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This paper attempts to explain the alternation between the prepositions a and de when used as complements to the adjectives contrario 'contrary', diferente 'different', and distinto 'distinct', as illustrated in Yo no fui distinta __mi madre 'I wasn't different __my mother', where both prepositions can be inserted. Relying on Langacker's3 notion of construal, the hypothesis is that a construes the comparison in the sense of 'direction toward' while de construes it in the sense of 'separation' or 'point of departure', and that these senses should be reflected in the usage contexts of the two prepositions. The quantitative analysis of some 800 cases extracted from Davies'4 two billion word Corpus del español, however, shows no indication of a and de setting up different construals. This lack of correlation between usage and semantics appears to be due to the diachronic generalization of a as complement of the three adjectives, thus relegating the use of de to specific collocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infant speech is the language of children under five years old, the typical language during the acquisition process of the first language. In this paper, different child language corpora are presented, from the first corpora in the form of diary studies and to the current computerized corpora. The main focus of this piece of work is to think about the issues and methodological challenges involved in this kind of research. Specifically they can be gathered in, first, how to make appropriate records in the collecting data, second, data representativeness, and third, problems derived from transcriptions, coding and labeling of the data. Moreover, ethical aspects when working with vulnerable population as children are also to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alternation in Spanish of más with negative adverbs in sequences like nada más vs. *más nada, nunca más vs. *más nunca has been frequently noted by different authors as a characteristic of some dialects. In this paper, we use several corpus prepared with data collected from Twitter through its public API. Thanks to this method, complementary to traditional techniques in dialectology, data are strictly synchronic for all of the Spanish-speaking areas. We selected only georeferenced data and gathered it in a MySQL relational database. Therefore, our corpus contains geographical information. Using GIS techniques for spatial analysis and open source software such as QGIS, a linguistic atlas can easily be prepared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infant speech is the language of children under five years old, the typical language during the acquisition process of the first language. In this paper, different child language corpora are presented, from the first corpora in the form of diary studies and to the current computerized corpora. The main focus of this piece of work is to think about the issues and methodological challenges involved in this kind of research. Specifically they can be gathered in, first, how to make appropriate records in the collecting data, second, data representativeness, and third, problems derived from transcriptions, coding and labeling of the data. Moreover, ethical aspects when working with vulnerable population as children are also to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]