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This paper aims at showing the areas of coincidence and dissidence between the Spanish and Italian languages and the possible consequences that the contrastive factor has on the possibility of intercomprehension and on the perspective of learning both as foreign languages. The topics of intercomprehension and the learning of foreign languages are associated not only with the concepts enunciated by Umberto Eco for Romance languages, but also with languages with less structural affinity. Our focus is the pragmatic distinctions beyond structural similarities and differences, arguing that the problem of the distance and proximity of two languages is centered on cultural heritage, rather than being strictly linguistic. To this end we provide didactic resources verified in university experience which can serve to channel and make explicit the intercultural experiences of future professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the meaning and uses of o así in the Spanish, and in the Spanish in contact with the Basque language. In the latter, some uses of o así attenuate the illocutionary force of the speech act, which is explained by grammaticalization. This process occurs taking into account a) the use of the Spanish o así as a reformulator for expressing attenuation; and b) the modality and evidentiality categories in the Basque conjunction edo, triggered by inferential and subjectification processes. [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]