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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]

The study of youth language has grown during the last decades, and covers quite a few of the particular features and ways of communicating that characterize young people. Contrastive studies in this area, however, are few and far between, no doubt due to the lack of corpora. In this paper, which is based on two corpora of youth language, COLT and COLAm, we compare some aspects of the use of the pragmatic markers like and como by adolescents in London and Madrid. Like and como are used for the same functions, although like is used twice as frequently as como. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish concessive clauses usually are constructed with the indicative when they refer to facts and with the subjunctive when they apply to hypothetical or future objections. However, the prototypical marker of counterarguments, "aunque," often appears with the subjunctive in merely factual contexts, like in the statement "No soy nacionalista, aunque sea vasco", pronounced by a Basque politician. The traditional explanations of this phenomenon are based upon factors like information structure (the subjunctive is supposed to convey more topical and less relevant information) or the speaker's attitude (the subjunctive is thought to reflect a more polemic and less cooperative behaviour). The aim of this paper, inspired by textual linguistics, is to connect the "aunque"-subjunctive in factual contexts with the underlying textual sequence. Numerous examples obtained from the Real Academia corpus show that the "aunque"-subjunctive plays an important part in polite argumentation and can be considered as a case of what I would like to call "argumentative subjunctive". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]