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This paper tackles the usefulness of comparing L2 learners against native speakers in empirical SLA studies focusing on grammatical aspect. Adapting the view that interlanguage grammars should be analysed in their own right instead of as a deficient form of the target, we show that expressing perspectivity (fulfilled by grammatical aspect markers) methodologically complicates the analyses of Grammaticality Judgment Tasks in aspect studies. For Spanish past tenses, we show that especially with items constructed as allegedly ungrammatical natives behave heterogeneously. This casts doubt on the question whether these data can be used as a baseline against which learners' data could be compared. By analysing the interlanguage separately (not only in comparison to the controls), our findings among German learners of L2 Spanish suggest the use of the forms depends essentially on temporal markers which can be related to both their L1 lacking grammatical aspect and the pedagogical input. Crucially, though the interlanguage does not match the target (i.e., past tenses do not necessarily correlate with aspectuality), the systems are not chaotic but follow well-defined rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the history of education in Chile in the 19th century, focusing on its institutions and fundamental actors. For the analysis, we analyse legal and educational texts, which structure the gestation and evolution of the education throughout this century More specifically, we pay attention to the aspects concerning grammar. The externalist and epihistoriographical approach adopted in this research allows us to draw essential conclusions for further general and particular research in this period, which emanate from the interdependence between education and the historical, social and cultural context. The results demonstrate both the importance given to Spanish grammar at all levels of teacher training, which would subsequently be transmitted to the students, as well as the preponderance of the figure of Bello in its theoretical bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine existing analyses for (restrictive) relative clauses and propose an analysis for Spanish relatives from the perspective of a lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). We will provide a summary of the main proposals in the literature and examine the questions that any analysis of relative clauses should address. Our TAG approach synthesises the descriptive and theoretical advantages of existing models (the head external analysis, the raising analysis, and the matching analysis) and offers a solution to some of the main problems that have been observed in the literature. We will focus on the internal configuration of relative clauses, their structural position, and the category of the expression que in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the elaboration of grammars for the Portuguese and Spanish languages, describing textual and extratextual aspects that characterize this process in the respective linguistic traditions and comparing them in order to find points of convergence and divergence. For that purpose, by consulting the physical and electronic collections of different research centers, it was possible to build a bibliographic corpus which allowed the fulfillment of the study's objective based on the analysis of 172 Portuguese and 138 Spanish grammars distributed since the 15th century. As a result, it was possible to observe that both codification traditions bring historical compatibilities which resulted in a process of linguistic normalization in which many features converge, while others diverge. They converge, for instance, in the intensification of this process from the 19th century onwards, marking a movement of constant growth. They diverge, on the other hand, in the number of countries engaged in the process and in the relation of school grammar to the descriptive model, for instance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the utility, validity and use of several grammatical notions, mostly syntactic. Our goal is to assess whether some frequent concepts of the language class in high school should be replaced by others that are generally unknown, and also whether the content currently given to some of them should be modified. We defend such a possibility, which we justify with the main argument that grammatical analyses must relate forms to meanings and favor the reflection of students on the unconscious knowledge that each speaker has of his or her own language, together with the use that speakers make of linguistic expressions. For expository reasons, we consider four types of grammatical notions: those that are both used and useful; those that are useful, but seldom applied; those that are usually applied, despite being of little use; and, finally, those that could be useful and that are rarely applied. We set out this discussion to defend the need to establish a stable terminology perimeter for high school language classes, mainly based on the recent Glosario de términos gramaticales (2019). We take this minimum terminological agreement to be a necessary condition to carry out that reflection, for which we have advocated in previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A formal perspective is the focus of this paper, which aims to discuss and represent the perception of nasalization of vowel /a/ in certain nasal contexts, a phenomenon of allophony in Spanish, which can be either phonological or allophonic in Portuguese. Empirical support is based on data from 9 native speakers from Montevideo, Uruguay, and 15 Brazilian learners of Spanish as a second language. Perception data, taken from studies carried out by Brisolara and Matzenauer (2018a, 2018b), were obtained by an Identification Test, which was run by the TP software program (RAUBER et al., 2012). The fact that the Uruguayan have lower accuracy than the Brazilian to identify nasalized vowels is attributed to the strict allophonic nature of the phenomenon in Spanish. It was captured and formalized by the Bidirectional Processing and Grammar Model -- BiPhon (BOERSMA, 2006, 2007; BOERSMA; HAMANN, 2009), which integrates the Stochastic Optimality Theory. Since perception, according to BiPhon, has the role of mapping continuous phonetic representation to a discrete phonological surface structure, the phenomenon related to the perception of nasalization of the vowel /a/ in Spanish was formalized in a way that represented, through the interaction between Cue Constraints and Structural Constraints, the difference between grammars of Brazilian Spanish learners and of Uruguayans: the weight of the *VORALN and *Vnasal Structural Constraints was decisive in specifying both grammars, and the proximity of the central values of the Structural and Cue Constraints represented the presence of variation in the perception data of the Uruguayan and the Brazilian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes aspects of a little-known work in the context of grammar and history of Spanish language teaching in Portugal, the Gramática espanhola para uso dos portugueses (Oporto, 1947) by Julio Martínez Almoyna: the possible reasons for its publication in Portugal in the mid-twentieth century, the structure of the lessons and its didactic characteristics. Regarding the first aspect, the writing of the work is framed in the Luso-Spanish socio-political context of the time. Regarding specifically methodological issues, we analyze in detail the microstructure of the lessons and the underlying didactic criteria. In order to examine the didactic characteristics of the manual, we put it in contrast with other works published in Portugal for the teaching of Spanish; specifically, the Gramática elemental de la lengua española (Lisbon, 1947), by Pablo Gayán Hernanz, and Español para lusitanos. Método práctico de lengua española (Coimbra, 1952), by José María Viqueira Barreiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two intertwined objectives that are consistent with the overall goal of using an interface grammar to describe different contrasts among languages. The first one is to describe the internal structure of the English resultative construction or KR, to characterize a representative sample of the KR subtypes and to render explicit the syntax-semantics interface conditions that make it possible. KR is a Macroevent that fuses two Events--an Activity and an Event proper--in the temporal sequence of a 'causal course of Events' so that this Event is the Result of the Activity. In order to reach this characterization, it is necessary to subsume Manner under Activity, Result under Change and CAUSE under 'causal course of Events'. The second objective is to expose the features that license the presence of KR in English while permitting a scarce presence of it in Spanish. KR is the Macroevent that complements the prototypical English Event, which opposes to Spanish in so far as it projects an Activity as main verb while the Spanish Event projects an Event proper. Thus, KR is not a complementary structure for the Spanish Event. Furthermore, KR reflects the typical 'open' combinatory English style, which is quite different from the Spanish 'close' one. This means that English allows for an open set of semantic relations between two words under the same structure while Spanish prefers to reduce them to (likely) one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a broad overview, seen from the perspective of Diachronic Construction Grammar, of the readings and values developed in Latin by the construction so/eo+iNF. The evidence provided and the analysis of the various factors involved in the interpretation of this periphrasis show that its original and basic value is not the expression of habitual aspect, as traditional models maintain, but a typifying meaning that should be considered in the framework of the continuous aspect. On the other hand, the structural possibilities and the behavior of so/eo+iNF in Latin allow to set an interesting reference framework to explain some particular uses of so/er+ INF in the earliest stages of the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the description of the verb soleo, the Latin cognate of the Spanish auxiliary soler, with the aim of contributing to the explanation of the Spanish lexical periphrasis soler + INF, when considering it from a diachronic perspective. Soleo is an especial verb whose singularity is manifested in its etymology and its grammatical particularities. Concerning its etymology, two hypotheses have been considered which start from two different Aktionsart stems: one makes it derive from a Proto-Indo-European iterative stem, the other from a stative one. From this second etymological hypothesis, soleo could be included among Latin denominative stative *e-presents with the basic meaning of 'to be of oneself, to have as one's own, to be normal, to be custom'. Regarding its morphosyntactic features, the semi-deponent soleo has a morphologically passive perfect stem, solitus sum, whose use with aoristic value comes into contradiction with the morphological restriction of the Spanish auxiliary soler and with the aspectual categorization of habitual auxiliary attributed to it. Together with the function as an auxiliary verb constituting a periphrasis with an infinitive, it also presents a use as a full lexical verb in which the prototypical semantic value of its etymology emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the main results of the allophonic variation of the consonantal group /...ɾ/ in a variety of Chilean Spanish -that of speakers that have not completed secondary education- obtained from eight cities (Iquique, La Serena, Valparaíso, Santiago, Concepción, Temuco, Coyhaique and Punta Arenas), using two elicitation tasks -semi-spontaneous interview and reading-aloud- completed by male and female speakers. The results showed that the sequence of plosive followed by a tap, that is /...ɾ/, was more frequent. In addition, the independent variables geographic origin, elicitation task and gender were shown to have a statistically significant effect on the phonetic realizations of /...ɾ/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a broad overview, seen from the perspective of Diachronic Construction Grammar, of the readings and values developed in Latin by the construction soleo+INF. The evidence provided and the analysis of the various factors involved in the interpretation of this periphrasis show that its original and basic value is not the expression of habitual aspect, as traditional models maintain, but a typifying meaning that should be considered in the framework of the continuous aspect. On the other hand, the structural possibilities and the behavior of soleo+INF in Latin allow to set an interesting reference framework to explain some particular uses of soler+INF in the earliest stages of the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the description of the verb soleo, the Latin cognate of the Spanish auxiliary soler, with the aim of contributing to the explanation of the Spanish lexical periphrasis soler + INF, when considering it from a diachronic perspective. Soleo is an especial verb whose singularity is manifested in its etymology and its grammatical particularities. Concerning its etymology, two hypotheses have been considered which start from two different Aktionsart stems: one makes it derive from a Proto-Indo-European iterative stem, the other from a stative one. From this second etymological hypothesis, soleo could be included among Latin denominative stative *ē-presents with the basic meaning of 'to be of oneself, to have as one's own, to be normal, to be custom'. Regarding its morphosyntactic features, the semi-deponent soleo has a morphologically passive perfect stem, solitus sum, whose use with aoristic value comes into contradiction with the morphological restriction of the Spanish auxiliary soler and with the aspectual categorization of habitual auxiliary attributed to it. Together with the function as an auxiliary verb constituting a periphrasis with an infinitive, it also presents a use as a full lexical verb in which the prototypical semantic value of its etymology emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the diatopic variation of the periphrasis andar + GER, comparing its use in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. To this end, the relative frequency of the construction is analyzed in several corpora, as well as its most distinctive semantic and syntactic features. Our quantitative analysis shows, on the one hand, the high frequency of andar + GER in Mexican Spanish as compared to Peninsular Spanish. On the other hand, it reveals that the periphrasis occurs, above all, in informal language modalities. Semantically, the present study corroborates that, in periphrases with a gerund, the verb andar ('to walk'), has progressively lost its lexical meaning of physical movement and has come to transmit pragmatic values, particularly of determination and insistence. In addition, unlike Peninsular Spanish, in Mexican Spanish the periphrasis is less subject to selectional restrictions with respect to the gerund, a relatively recent change that points to a strong grammaticalization. Syntactically, the grammaticalization process is reflected in the adjacency of the auxiliary and the gerund, the fixed internal order of the two components of the periphrasis, clitic climbing and a drop in the frequency of coordinated gerunds. The case of andar + GER demonstrates that grammaticalization of the same construction can take place in different ways depending on the specific dialectal environment. Likewise, and at a more general level, it stresses the importance of a diatopic approach in studies on verbal periphrases and grammaticalization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a diachronic study of the inchoative periphrases comenzar a and empezar a + INFINITIVE drawing upon grammaticalization theory, in an attempt to contribute to the history of Spanish and, particularly, to the studies focused on verbal periphrases. Based on the results of an analysis of a large number of documented occurrences between the 11th and 21st centuries, we propose that the lexical meaning of words to be relevant in the construction of grammatical pieces; therefore synonymy seems to play an important role in shaping the grammar of a language. As we will see, alternation of the studied forms shows that both coexist nowadays, and that their use is conditioned both by contextual and chronological factors, because both express the same semantic values. Since the use of empezar a + INFINITIVE increases around the 19th century, we reflect on other change processes linked to verbal periphrases during this period, and on their importance in the syntactic periodization of Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a non-normative phenomenon almost unknown in Spanish, the "pluralization" of adverbs in -mente (lugares realmentes sorprendentes 'places really surprising'), which is not found in the main grammars of this language. From the data of Corpus del español we propose to make known this phenomenon, to show in which countries it is documented and with what frequency. Later, we analyze which adverbs in -mente show this final -s in current Spanish and in what syntactic contexts are given. In particular, we show that the kind of adverbs that are involved in this phenomenon are degree, modality, and focusing adverbs, mainly when they modify adjectives or sentences. Finally, we propose an explanation of the presence of this final -s based on two different processes that the Spanish language undergoes in the grammatical category of adverbs: adverbial agreement, which so far has been described for quantifier adverbs, and adverb "false" pluralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the disjoint reference effect in passive constructions with ser and estar 'to be', which consists in the impossibility of having a reflexive reading. I show, based on an empirical study undertaken with speakers of Peninsular Spanish, that said effect holds in passives with ser, but not with estar. I develop a theoretical proposal to account for the data. My study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the properties of passive participles with ser and estar in Spanish, as well as to the current study of verbal and adjectival passives in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School grammar books for the teaching of Spanish language have been a secondary object of study until recently, since historiographical researches have always tended to focus on more theoretical texts. Similarly, conjunctions have never drawn much attention either. Considered as accessory elements of speech --"azesoria", in words of Correas ([1625] 1954)--, their analysis was relegated to a second place or just omitted in most of the studies about authors or systems of parts of speech. However, in the last few decades, more studies about school grammar books, on the one hand, and conjunctions, on the other, have been published, helping to shed some light on the development of the history of the grammatical ideas. This paper describes the way conjunctions have been addressed in Spanish school grammar books. The chosen period, between 1780 and 1830, coincides with the birth and consolidation of this textual genre (García Folgado 2013), as well as with the configuration of the two main descriptive frameworks within which the grammatization of conjunctions has taken place (Martín Gallego 2018). Our approach, ultimately, aims at answering two questions: (i) till what extent and how the description of the conjunction reflects the characterization of school grammar; and, (ii) by what means did school grammar books contributed to grammatize conjunctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the geometry of phi-features, with a special emphasis on number and gender in Spanish. We address two sets of questions: (i) are number and gender bundled together or do they constitute separate categories, and (ii) does the internal feature composition of number and gender follow a single- or a multi-valued system? Given the lack of consensus on these issues based on primary data, we approach these questions experimentally, using the phenomenon of agreement attraction: a situation in which ungrammatical sequences are perceived as grammatical when one of the NPs is erroneously identified as determining agreement. Our results offer novel support in favor of an agreement model in which number and gender are in separte projections and are valued independently. In addition, our results indicate that number but not gender in Spanish is multi-valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the studies and widespread international appraisal of Andrés Bello's writings, his crucial importance in the history of Spanish Grammar is not only highlighted, but also does this paper manifest his remarkable role as precursor of the major currents of linguistic studies of the 20th century: the European and the American structuralisms, the generative grammar and the pragmatics. By referring to Bello's traditional studies his significance in Modern Philology is clearly shown, and some unique and surprising findings on Bello's idea on the translation of libretti (i.e. the actual vocal parts of opera) are presented by the author of this paper. Bello's characterization and assessment of the difficulties that arise from the symbiosis of text and music in these texts are pronounced about 80 years ahead of Gustav Becher's famous holistic theory on the translation of this type of texts. A theory which, according to distinguished European musicologists, has lead the way in the discussion of the functionality of these distinct interlingual transfers throughout the 20th century, as well as a revaluation of this specific activity during the preceding centuries (15th - 19th century). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the stigmatized use of impersonal se with a plural verb and the prepositional accusative. While this pattern occurs commonly in speech and many forms of writing, it has to all intents been airbrushed from academic consideration of Spanish. On the one hand, the normative authorities dismiss it as an error and on the other it is studiously ignored by professional linguists. Given the pattern's de facto productivity, it is argued in this paper that its exclusion from the standard corpus is essentially arbitrary, the result of a priori assumptions about what should be possible in grammar rather than detached scientific consideration of what actually occurs. More specifically, both prescriptive grammar and theoretical linguistics take it as axiomatic that (in languages like Spanish) number agreement on the finite verb is determined by the subject and never by the object. The pattern discussed here is irreconcilable with that view and, accordingly, has come to be treated as a non-legitimate datum. The case thus provides a good illustration of how the concept of grammaticality, supposedly the empirical foundation of modern syntax, may be no less arbitrary than the older normative principle of correct usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose the relevance of tracing the collections of documents in teacher training centres, the so-called Escuelas Normales (Normal Schools), and their importance for reconstructing the history of grammar teaching in general, and, in particular, the history of school grammar. In order to do this, we approached a specific type of document: the so-called "Development" or "Answers" to the syllabi of the Spanish language subject, and we also analyse one text addressed to the Escuelas Normales of Valencia, produced by the 'normal school' teacher Cervera y Royo in his 1898 syllabus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of Simón Rodríguez, especially that of his work American societies, from the perspective of the social actors who would have intervened in a national and republican inclusive project. With an in-depth knowledge of Rodríguez's ideas relating to indigenous and Afro-American populations, the paper argues that his project would have best represented the construction of pluralistic societies more in tune with the libertarian and democratic ideals that motivated the independence movements in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Main clauses in Spanish optionally include a root complementizer. The presence of the complementizer adds a reportative component to the meaning of the clause. This paper attempts to characterize more precisely the kind of grammatical object represented by those reports. It argues that the Spanish main clause reports must be analyzed as instances of quotative constructions, and that the latter must be represented as involving an underlying predication between a clausal constituent and a quotative predicate. This predicate is overt in many languages, but silent in Spanish. The paper provides syntactic arguments in support of this hypothesis, as well as a comparison between the properties of those constructions and hearsay evidentiality, which is argued to be a different phenomenon. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba cogitandi (e.g. “considerar”/“consider”, “encontrar”/“find”, etc.) in English and Spanish. Building on Gonzálvez-García [Gonzálvez-García, F., 2006a. Passives without Actives: Evidence from Verbless Complement Constructions in Spanish. Constructions SV1-5/2006; Gonzálvez-García, F., 2003. Reconstructing object complements in English and Spanish. In: Martínez Vázquez, M. (Eds.), Gramática de Construcciones (Contrastes entre el Inglés y el Español). Grupo de Gramática Contrastiva, Huelva, pp. 17–58], these configurations are argued to be constructions in their own right, viz. the subjective–transitive construction. The main focus of this paper is on the investigation of the most salient semantico-pragmatic hallmarks of four lower-level configurations of the subjective–transitive construction in the light of coercion [Michaelis, L.A., 2003a. Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In: Cuyckens, H., Dirven, R., Taylor, J., (Eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 163–209; Michaelis, L.A., 2003b. Headless constructions and coercion by construction. In: Francis, E., Michaelis, L.A., (Eds.), Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. CSLI, Stanford, pp. 259–310; Michaelis, L.A., 2004a. Type shifting in construction grammar: an integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15 (1), 1–67; Michaelis, L.A., 2004b. Why we believe that syntax is construction-based. Unpublished plenary delivered at the Third International Conference on Construction Grammar(s), Université de Provence, Marseille, July 9, 2004.] via (i) obligatory reflexive pronouns in the object slot, (ii) a progressive verb form with an inherently stative situation/state of affairs, (iii) an imperative verb with a prima facie non-controllable situation/state of affairs, and (iv) an imperfect tense with a counterfactual interpretation. It is shown that while the first three types of coercion are observable in both English and Spanish, type (iv) points to an interesting asymmetry between these two languages, thus lending further credence to the assumption that argument structure is construction-specific as well as language-specific. Moreover, it is demonstrated that these configurations can be aptly regarded as a family of constructions and that a non-monotonic, default inheritance system of the type invoked in the cognitively-influenced strand of Construction Grammar [Goldberg, A.E., 1995. Constructions. A Construction Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London; Goldberg, A.E., 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press, New York] can capture the commonalities and the idiosyncratic particulars of these conventional extensions in the construct-i-con. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper is an English-Spanish corpus-based contrastive study of multiple modification within the boundaries of the noun phrase. This issue is particularly problematic when comparing English and Spanish, and causes difficulties in foreign language learning as well as in translation processes between the two languages. The aim of this study is to unveil the interaction between meaning and grammar in this linguistic area in English and Spanish, revealing the different grammatical structures used in the two languages to actualise a particular meaning. The approach followed in this paper is a functional one (Bondarko 1991; Chesterman 1998). The empirical data on which the study is based are instances of authentic language in use extracted from two large monolingual reference corpora, Cobuild/Bank of English and CREA (Reference Corpus of Contemporary Spanish). The contrastive analysis consists of three stages: description, juxtaposition and a contrastive stage in which functional-semantic correspondences are suggested on the basis of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Minsheu has long been known to historians of lexicography as the author of an impressive comparative and etymological dictionary, Ductor in Linguas. Less well known is his grammar of Spanish, which is unusual for its time in displaying interest in socio-linguistic issues. This paper is intended to stimulate interest in the neglected grammar and to propose a solution to the mystery of Minsheu's biography--a topic likewise overlooked in the literature. The paper ends with a set of proposals for further research. Historians of English lexicography are generally familiar with the dictionaries of John Minsheu, but the numerous studies of his work, to a large extent by Spanish authors, are usually devoted to commentaries on the etymology of individual words as proposed by Minsheu. What is lacking is any examination of the socio-linguistic context in which he was working as well as any attempt at a biography, however superficial, other than the minimum of information obtainable from the prefaces to his publications. One topic of special interest in Minsheu's grammar is the function of pronouns, Minsheu claiming that it is one of the most difficult things in the tongue to have the true use of them, and whereby a stranger or the unlearned in his speech or writing, shall soonest discover himself to the natural or learned in the tongue.

I aim to show that the Spanish Noun Phrase is a network of relationships. More specifically, I aim to show that the structure and the function of the Spanish Noun Phrase can be described and explained by Lamb's relational networks. In fact, relational networks notation allow us not only to describe the Spanish Noun Phrase, but also to elucidate some features that are not elucidated by a description in words or in linear notation: they allow us to understand that the choice of a concrete grammatical structure is determined by the choice of the meanings that will be communicated. The Spanish Noun Phrase is a complex syntactic structure whose account in relational terms helps us to understand how the necessity of expressing certain meanings determines lexicogrammatical choices. Within the linguistic network, the nections at the lexicogrammatical level are connected to certain nections at the sememic level, and the activation of such sememic nections is what determines the activation of certain lexicogrammatical nections. Since relational networks show that grammatical structures are determined by meaning, the account developed in this paper reinforces the idea that Relational Network Theory is compatible with Systemic Functional Linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the geometry of phi-features, with a special emphasis on number and gender in Spanish. We address two sets of questions: (i) are number and gender bundled together or do they constitute separate categories, and (ii) does the internal feature composition of number and gender follow a single- or a multi-valued system? Given the lack of consensus on these issues based on primary data, we approach these questions experimentally, using the phenomenon of agreement attraction: a situation in which ungrammatical sequences are perceived as grammatical when one of the NPs is erroneously identified as determining agreement. Our results offer novel support in favor of an agreement model in which number and gender are in separte projections and are valued independently. In addition, our results indicate that number but not gender in Spanish is multi-valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual notions, although displayed most clearly in verbs, manifest across categories, with notions like (un)boundedness manifesting themselves in several instantiations which are sometimes specific of individual grammatical categories. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how aspectual notions emerge in different categorial domains by an analysis of subject-experiencer and object-experiencer psychological predicates (SEPVs and OEPVs, respectively). We review the evidence that SEPVs denote individual level (IL) states, and provide new facts - taken from the behaviour of participles - in favour of that diagnostic; we also argue that OEPVs should be classified as states of the stage level (SL) class. We argue that OEPVs denote states with an onset, which corresponds to the denotation of SLs. SEPVs simply denote states without boundaries, which we argue to correspond to IL predicates. Finally, we show how these two denotations follow without further assumptions from the structures proposed for SEPVs and OEPVs in previous work, specially Pesetsky (1995), making it unnecessary to postulate that the distinction is of lexical nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of gender agreement in three little studied Afro-Andean dialects: Chinchano Spanish (Perú), Yungueño Spanish (Bolivia) and Chota Valley Spanish (Ecuador). Data is presented showing a variety of DP gender agreement configurations significantly divergent from standard Spanish. A unified account for these phenomena is proposed combining quantitatitative methodology and several forms of data collection with a Minimalist approach to data explanation and interpretation. The provided analysis charts evolution and variation of gender agreement, arguing that the parallel development of gender agreement in these three Afro-Hispanic contact varieties can be explained by an approach in which change takes place along paths set by universal properties of grammar (feature valuation, locality of agreement, gradience of fitness in grammatical development, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Castilian grammars intended for use in secondary school are published in the decade of1850. These grammars must be understood in relation with those used in primary school. They participate in the consolidation of national subjectivities (thanks to the spread of the common language), in social disciplining (determining the standard to be met by the practice) and in the reproduction of social structures (educating the members of the elite). The present paper refers to the subject of syntax in four texts published respectively in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Guanajuato and Madrid. We consider the units established in the grammars, the treatment of figures and the analysis they propose in exercises or in recapitulating illustrations. The study allows us to appreciate the guidance offered by grammars but also the different perspectives on grammatical knowledge, on its function in secondary school and on the subject who attends school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In previous studies, the importance of the work edited by Nicolau Peixoto -- Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos Portuguezes (Oporto 1848) -- as the first grammar of Spanish published in Portugal has already been stressed. This paper aims to go further in Peixoto's work, focusing on the contrastive notes regarding the target language and the mother tongue of it's audience, so as to frame those comments in the previous tradition of Portuguese-Spanish contrastive studies, among which the works of Howell (1662), Bluteau (1721) and Moura (1821) stand out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study one type of Spanish que (the equivalent to the complementizer "that") that can be shown to belong into the crosslinguistically restricted list of evidentials. In particular, we will claim that it encodes the (most basic) marks of non- first-hand or indirect (reported) evidence. Our point of departure is certain (apparently) independent clauses of Spanish headed by an overt complementizer (que). Some tests will be presented that support the idea that that one type of que introducing a well specified subset of root sentences shares most of the properties that have been claimed to characterize reportative evidentials in languages such as Quechua (Faller 2002, 2006). As for the properties of reportative que, it will be further shown that it does not encode any features related to epistemic modality (reliability or (im)probability) and we will propose that it is better analyzed as an illocutionary operator, affecting the illocutionary force (in line with Faller 2002 among others) and not as an epistemic modal (Izvorsky 1997 among others). In order to determine the nature of this reportative element and its origin, we contrast it with an old Spanish form, dizque, which exists nowadays in certain modern American varieties. This particle also has the properties of an evidential but behaves as an epistemic modal. In the last sections, we will propose that both evidential particles (que and dizque) are the result of a process of grammaticalization (i.e. 'upward reanalysis', or categorial change, of functional material, in the sense of Roberts and Roussou 2003) of the complex structure headed by a communication verb, dicen que "they say that". We will tentatively describe such process and introduce a hypothesis as to the nature and role of the parameter involved in the claimed reanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the behaviour of VP topicalization in two unrelated languages, Hungarian and Spanish. It will show that in spite of the superficial similarity between the elements involved in such topicalization, the two languages employ a fundamentally different strategy in the derivation of these sentences. Hungarian fronts the VP material and spells it out in the form of a resumptive pronoun in the left periphery, in a mechanism similar to that described in Grohmann (2003). Spanish on the other hand generates the resumptive pronominal as an argument internal to the clause. This difference in the two derivations correlates with other differences in VP topicalization in the two languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In Dominican Spanish, speakers produce the marker /‑(e)se/ to turn singulars arroz and gallina into the plurals arrócese and gallínase. Núñez Cedeño (2003) proposed that grammar alone is insufficient to account for its distribution. He introduced an information structure explanation suggesting that pragmatic factors guided speakers in selecting specific grammatical contexts to insert a /‑(e)se/ plural [instead of a /‑(e)s/ plural]. Colina (2006) proposed an alternative optimality analysis arguing that the regular plural is formed on a plural /‑s/ regulated by a constraint which prevents it from surfacing. This paper proposes a three-pronged approach to counter previous analyses. Firstly, it shows that the ‘double plural’ does not exist and that /‑e/, not /‑s/, signals plural formation. Secondly, this analysis shows that previous accounts relying on focused constituents only cannot hold because /‑se/ realization occurs both in focus and topic positions. Thirdly, based on the Expressive Morphology hypothesis, this article proposes that /‑se/ is an expressive morphological marker used under some restricted morpho-phonological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we analyze spontaneous and experimental data involving code-mixed DPs made up of English Determiners+Spanish Nouns (the casa “house”) and Spanish Determiners+English Nouns (la [the/feminine] house) from child English/Spanish simultaneous bilinguals and from L1 speakers of English, French and Spanish with different levels of proficiency in their respective L2s (Spanish in the case of L1 English and French; English in the case of L1 Spanish). We show that early child bilinguals and adult simultaneous bilinguals (production data) and L1 speakers of Spanish (experimental data) favor mixings where Spanish provides the functional category, the Determiner, over mixings where English does. We also show that when confronted with these mixed DPs adult L1 Spanish speakers and non-native speakers share a preference for the English D followed by a preference for the default gender marking in Spanish, the masculine (el [the/masculine] house). In the case of the L1 Spanish speakers, this preference is overridden by the “analogical criterion”, (la [the/feminine] house), which consists of assigning the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent (“casa” is feminine) to the English Noun. We provide a linguistic account of these preferences based on the intrinsic Gender feature of the Spanish Noun and the intrinsic Gender Agreement feature or the Spanish Determiner and argue that the cognitive mechanisms employed by the bilingual, the Spanish L1 speaker and the Spanish L2 speaker in spontaneous production and in the grammaticality judgments task make different use of these linguistic units. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a study on the systematization of the contextual varieties of yod, the glide in phonetic terms. This paper focuses on the development of the Spanish vowels giving emphasis on the vowels before the palatal glides and obstruents. It also focuses on the historical grammar that evolved into a confused chapter in historical grammar of the Hispano-Romance. The author attempts to point out significant issues on the major anomalies in the development by emphasizing on the well-established sounds to those that shift from the general pattern.

The paper analyses the grammatical trait peculiar to Spanish and other Romance languages consisting in the ateposition of the preposition a to the direct object when this object refers to a person. The study begins with some considerations on transitivity and types of direct object, states that prepositional direct object must have its origin in Latin, since it exists in an ample zone of the Romania, examines possible semantic-functional motivations for its use (disambiguation when subject and object are animated and can therefore act as agents, individualition, or emphasis). Afterwards it presents an extense number of texts with direct object, with and without a; it concludes that in using or omitting the preposition a with direct object the speaker has much freedom to choose one or the other alternative provided there is no abiguity and that the only rule never violated in this respect is that personal pronouns functioning as direct object must be preceded by a ("La veo a ella") [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a generative analysis for a particular language contact phenomenon familiar in the variationist and language contact literature, namely indirect transfer [F. Klein, A quantitative study of syntactic and pragmatic indications of change in the Spanish of bilinguals in the U.S, in: W. Labov (Ed.), Locating Language in Time and Space, Academic Press, New York, 1980, p. 69; R. Mougeon, E. Beniak, Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact and Restriction: The Case of French in Ontario, OUP, Oxford, 1991; C. Silva-Corvalán, Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles, OUP, Oxford, 1994]. This language contact effect, which is preferential rather than categorical, is difficult to deal with in traditional generative approaches, and has received no attention in this literature. My analysis focuses on Klein's study of synthetic/analytic verb forms used for the expression of progressive aspect in Spanish, where contact with English causes a skewing in the distribution of use of analytic forms in a bilingual variety compared to a similar monolingual variety. The analysis is carried out in a stochastic OT [P. Boersma, B. Hayes, Empirical tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm. Linguistic Inquiry 32 (1) (2001) 45–86] framework, where I show that the indirect transfer effects observed by Klein can be captured by way of different ranking of a small set of OT constraints on a linear ranking scale. In addition to providing a model for the indirect transfer effects in Klein's study, my analysis also makes a typological prediction regarding morphosyntactic expression and Imperfective and Progressive verb forms: no language can have a synthetic Progressive and an analytic Imperfective. This prediction is supported by the absence of any such distribution in the surveys of Bybee et al. [The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994] or Dahl [Tense and Aspect Systems, Blackwell, Oxford, 1985]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]