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This article addresses anaphoric reference to clausally introduced propositions in Spanish. Although Spanish “canonically” uses the clitic lo as the direct object pronoun referring to these kinds of entities, its omission is also possible. This paper offers evidence showing that (lack of) knowledge on the part of the speaker about the full content of the proposition plays a role in the choice between the clitic lo and its omission: omission is possible (although not necessary) when the speaker lacks knowledge of the complete content of the proposition, whereas the opposite situation favors the use of the clitic lo . Quantitative and qualitative data supporting this idea come from the distribution of lo and its omission in the no (lo) sé (‘I don’t know’) expression, the constructions no poder decir and no saber decir (‘can’t say’) and the expression quién (lo) sabe (‘who knows’). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the spontaneously produced intonation of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) declaratives. ABS is an Afro-Hispanic language of the Americas (AHLAs) spoken in the region of Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. The main findings indicate the presence in ABS of certain intonational features that diverge from those of other native varieties of Spanish. In line with recent hypotheses on the genesis and evolution of ABS and other AHLAs ( Sessarego, 2013a,b ), we propose that our results reflect advanced second language acquisition processes, which do not imply any previous (de)creolization phase for these Afro-Hispanic varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative study of the relationship between discourse positions and pragmatic functions of the Spanish discourse markers derived from motion verbs, namely anda , vamos , vaya and venga . These discourse markers are highly polyfunctional and concurrently have a high degree of positional freedom. The results show, first, that the position of a discourse marker and the discourse unit in which the marker is inserted restrict or activate its pragmatic functions. More particularly, discourse markers with an expressive, conative or discourse structuring function present a more increased pragmatic scope than those with a textual function operating at a more profound level of the discourse. Second, the degree of distributional freedom is related to the potential semantic-pragmatic autonomy of the discourse markers, rather than to the degree of functional diversity. In other words, discourse markers that do not necessarily depend on other discourse units (within the same turn) to convey their communicative intentions show a higher degree of positional freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the framework of grammaticalization, analogy is usually considered as a precondition for change. One of the hotly debated topics is its status as a mechanism or a motivation for change. The present paper aims to investigate the role of analogy in the development of Spanish binominal quantifiers and zooms in on the histories of seven quantifying nouns, viz., aluvión, barbaridad, (h)atajo, letanía, mar, montón and pila . The distinct nature of the developmental pathways followed tones down the triggering force or coercing impact of rather schematic constructions. Analogy is operationalized as a two-dimensional process: a clear distinction is made between paradigmatic analogical thinking (which motivates change) and syntagmatic analogical thinking (which also constrains change and interacts with conceptual persistence). In addition, analogical mechanisms are at work both construction-internally and construction-externally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the meaning of Spanish todavía , traditionally considered as a durative time adverb, sometimes translatable into English as still or yet but not always. Our main point is that the semantic content of this lexical item consists of two procedural components. The first one is a basic continuative aspectual sense, while the second instructs for the contextual incorporation of an assumption about a potential transition. This approach has several virtues. First, it allows us to maintain a parsimonious analysis, which shows that there is no need to treat todavía as two distinct lexical items with different polarities each, as some have proposed ( Bosque, 1980 ). We suggest, in contrast, that in Spanish todavía can be analysed as a single lexical item, and we account for its behaviour both in affirmative and in negative clauses. Second, we argue that the procedural component of the meaning of todavía explains its distribution patterns. It also clarifies the origin of the implicatures of various strengths about the future that may emerge when it is used. Finally, our characterisation allows us to provide an explanation of the way in which the wide range of meanings and pragmatic effects that are attached to the use of todavía (e.g. scalar readings, emphasis and concession) can be derived from the basic semantic sense we propose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to establish the evidential character of the special prosodic configuration associated with direct reported discourse (DRD). A variety of expressive meanings have been commonly attributed to this marked prosodic configuration of DRD (such as expression of stance, emotion, mimicking, alignment). However, the concurrence of pragmatic/expressive meanings together with evidentiality is very frequent in ‘non-evidential’ languages like Spanish. Therefore, we argue that the prosody in DRD also signals ‘reported’ or ‘quoted’ discourse and, therefore, the presence of evidentiality. To provide evidence for this latter claim, 449 instances of DRD have been extracted from a corpus of (Iberian) Spanish colloquial conversations containing c. 150,000 words, and their prosodic behaviour has been observed. The data reveals a marked prosody in the majority of DRD instances in our corpus. Especial attention has been paid to the examples of DRD with no explicit introductory marks (e.g. verba dicendi ), since 100% of them are prosodically marked. Here, the marked prosody is the only indicator of the source of information. Consequently, it stops being a redundant trait (concomitant to the presence of introductory verbs or marks): it becomes prominent and its use is not optional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the evidential particles and adverbs in Spanish are believed to have developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. This also coincides with the consolidation of scientific writing in Spanish, a genre that holds a special relation with the expression of sources of information. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to study the evolution of the Spanish evidential discourse particle al parecer (‘seemingly, apparently’) in scientific texts of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Our analysis shows that in the period under review the occurrences of the evidential particle al parecer were dominant, but they were not the only uses of this construction. It coexisted with two other constructions: a two-member construction al parecer x, pero en realidad y (‘it appears to be x, but in reality is y’) with inferential interpretation and with a construction al parecer with physical meaning ( es al parecer rómbico ; ‘it looks rhombic’). Our data suggests that only the occurrences of the grammaticalized discourse particle al parecer were purely evidential. Furthermore, it shows that the evidential meaning of the particle developed toward more indirect evidentiality during the process of fixation. In the context of the genre analyzed, all three constructions of al parecer reflect the changes in the scientific writing practices: from basing the evidences on personal observation to relying on the experiment and reporting from the common knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with previous approaches that analyze dizque ‘supposedly, allegedly’ as a purely evidential marker encoding reported speech and implying epistemic modality ( Travis, 2006; Olbertz, 2007 ), this paper proposes, from a Cognitive Grammar perspective, that the core meaning of dizque corresponds to a schematic representation where the veracity of events is called into question. New extensions develop to disqualify events as either false or inadequate since they lack some nuclear property of their category. It is proposed that the core meaning of dizque has changed from reportative to a pragmatic marker encoding epistemic and evaluative readings. As a nominal modifier dizque undertakes evaluative meanings, as a clause modifier it undertakes epistemic readings. Further extensions from epistemic readings imply intentions of bragging, pretending and deceiving as seen from the speaker's perspective. Evaluative and epistemic meanings have taken over the old reportative function of dizque to such extent that the complementizer que must be introduced to create a new evidential-epistemic marker que dizque, where que attests that what is being questioned was expressed by some unidentified source and dizque questions the veracity of the clause. Finally, the emergence of an even newer epistemic marker quesque emerging in Mexican informal speech is accounted for in terms of weakened evidentiality and increased epistemicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spanish, several constituents have their unmarked position after the sentence's main verb (direct objects, locative adjuncts, depictives, etc.). The linearity of linguistic expressions implies that if two such postverbal constituents appear in a given sentence they must be ordered in a certain way. The present paper examines information focus and syntactic weight as possible factors in postverbal constituent order. Based on data from two experimental studies it will be shown that (i) these factors indeed play a role in postverbal constituent order in Spanish and that (ii) postverbal constituent order is characterized at the same time by optionality and preferences (e.g., although a direct object (dO) and a depictive (DEP) can be ordered as DEP-dO or dO-DEP, the order dO-DEP is clearly preferred over DEP-dO). To account for the optionality and preferences, the data will be modeled in a (simplified) Stochastic Optimality Theory grammar without assuming a basic constituent order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the micro-interactional co-construction of power within Spanish language concordant medical consultations in California involving a third party family member. Findings indicate the third party instigates code-switching to English on the part of medical providers, a language that the patient does not understand, rendering the patient a non-participant in the medical consultation. In these consultations involving a third party family member, monolingual Spanish-speaking patients are stripped of control in ways that are similar to other powerless groups in medical consultations. Implications include the need to further examine how micro-level interactions reproduce societal ideologies and shape policy on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the long-standing assumption that (External or Internal) Merge is a necessary condition for theta-role assignment is challenged. It is argued, then, that a theory of thematic assignment which allows for long-distance theta-role assignment under conditions of locality and activity is empirically preferable when it comes to some complex interactions between se and causative constructions in Buenos Aires Spanish. It is also shown that recent arguments against long-distance theta-role assignment do not hold in a theory as the one defended here, which conceives of theta-roles as regulated by conditions generally available in the realm of A-dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to classify Medical Records (MRs) by their diagnostic terms (DTs) according to the International Classification of Diseases Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM). The challenge we face is twofold: (i) to treat the natural and non-standard language in which doctors express their diagnostics and (ii) to perform a large-scale classification problem. We propose the use of Finite-State Transducers (FSTs) that, for their underlying topology, constrain the allowed input DT string while synchronously produce the output ICD-9-CM class. It is outstanding their versatility to efficiently implement soft-matching operations between terms expressed in natural language to standard terms and, hence, to the final ICD-9-CM code. The FSTs were built up from a corpora and standard resources such as the ICD-9-CM and SNOMED CT amongst others. Our corpora count on a big-data comprising more than 20,000 DTs from MRs from the Basque Hospital System so as to model natural language in this domain. An F1-measure of 91.2 was achieved on a test-set of 2850 randomly selected DTs, and a random 5-fold cross validation on a training set served to double-check the stability of the provided results. Real MRs were of much help to adapt the system to natural language. Misspellings, colloquial and specific language and abbreviations made the classification process difficult. The FSTs were proven efficient in this large-scale classification task. Moreover, the composition operation for FSTs made it easy the addition of new features to the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many instances of verb-object combinations involving change of state verbs, different kinds of internal arguments seem to trigger distinct interpretations of the verb phrase. These are usually divided into literal uses, such as romper la ventana ‘break the window’ or cortar el papel ‘cut the paper’ and figurative uses such as romper el desarrollo ‘interrupt the development’ or cortar la circulación ‘cut off the circulation’. Based on an extensive manual annotation of corpus (the used corpus is the El País Corpus consisting of all the El País newspaper issues from 1976 to 2007 and is hosted at the Insitut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada (IULA) at the University Pompeu Fabra) data involving verb-object combinations with Spanish change of state verbs, I argue that combinations like romper el desarrollo or cortar la circulación , far from representing frozen idiom chunks, exemplify very productive compositional patterns. The frequency and naturalness with which change of state verbs take both physical and abstract entities as objects raises the question of how verbs express their meaning and makes this kind of data especially relevant for a theory of the lexicon as well as of composition. I provide a clear inventory of the typical combinatorial patterns of romper and cortar and I show that their combinatorial behaviour is much more diverse than usually acknowledged. I then argue that these facts need to be addressed by the compositional system, rather than by postulating homophonic lexical entires (Dowty, 1979; Alonso Ramos, 2011) or contextualist accounts (Recanati, 2005). For a proposal I turn to Modern Type Theories, which allow me to incorporate a richer notion of lexical semantics within compositional semantics. These theories thus allow me provide an insightful compositional account of what has long been considered non-compositional, namely combinations of change of state verbs with objects denoting abstract entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of phonetic contrasts and related phenomena, e.g. inter- and intra-speaker variability, often requires to analyse data in the form of measured time series, like f 0 contours and formant trajectories. As a consequence, the investigator has to find suitable ways to reduce the raw and abundant numerical information contained in a bundle of time series into a small but sufficient set of numerical descriptors of their shape. This approach requires one to decide in advance which dynamic traits to include in the analysis and which not. For example, a rising pitch gesture may be represented by its duration and slope, hence reducing it to a straight segment, or by a richer coding specifying also whether (and how much) the rising contour is concave or convex, the latter being irrelevant in some context but crucial in others. Decisions become even more complex when a phenomenon is described by a multidimensional time series, e.g. by the first two formants. In this paper we introduce a methodology based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA) that allows the investigator to delegate most of the decisions involved in the quantitative description of multidimensional time series to the data themselves. FDA produces a data-driven parametrisation of the main shape traits present in the data that is visually interpretable, in the same way as slopes or peak heights are. These output parameters are numbers that are amenable to ordinary statistical analysis, e.g. linear (mixed effects) models. FDA is also able to capture correlations among different dimensions of a time series, e.g. between formants F 1 and F 2 . We present FDA by means of an extended case study on diphthong – hiatus distinction in Spanish, a contrast that involves duration, formant trajectories and pitch contours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a corpus-based examination of pragmatic marker use in Spanish as a foreign language. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, it examines the frequency and seven functional differences in the use of pues and bueno in the oral examination of 46 participants using the Computer Assisted Screening Tool (CAST) online test. The participants were adult (average age 22) non-native speaking examinees at two levels of language proficiency. The study investigated whether examinees’ proficiency level would influence the pragmatic markers’ rate of occurrence and variety of functions. Frequency measures of pragmatic markers were obtained from examinees rated at two levels of proficiency: ‘full’ or ‘fail’. 1 1 ‘Full’ and ‘fail’ are the terms used in the CAST test as descriptors of the test takers who were rated as highly proficient (‘full’), or as not meeting the criteria for highly proficient (‘fail’). In no way are they intended to disparage the efforts of any test takers. A discourse analytic approach was then employed to examine the discursive functions of pragmatic markers. The quantitative results showed that proficiency level was significantly related to the overall frequency of use of the focal markers, with the ‘full’ group tending to use them more frequently than the ‘fail’ group. Qualitatively, the study found that higher proficiency speakers used both pragmatic markers for a wider range of functions than their lower proficiency counterparts. The discussion considers the implications for raising learner awareness of pragmatic marker contributions to perceived oral fluency and pragmatic capacity. [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]

In this paper, an account of the differences between three varieties of Spanish with accusative clitic doubling is proposed. The dialects studied are: Andean, Buenos Aires and Lima Spanish. Buenos Aires and Lima Spanish are varieties that express full agreement (i.e. agreement in gender and number) between the clitic and a doubled direct object, whereas Andean Spanish is a dialect that neutralizes gender and number distinctions in 3rd person clitics. It is commonly assumed that clitic doubling is derived through object movement to Spec,vP. This is the case of Lima and Buenos Aires dialects. We claim that, in Andean Spanish, the doubled constituents remain in a vP internal position. We propose that the apparent doubling phenomenon registered in some varieties of Andean Spanish is not a case of clitic doubling, but a different phenomenon. A second source of variation explored is Kayne's Generalization – the condition on object DPs to bear a visible morphological case marker in order to be clitic doubled. Buenos Aires Spanish differs from Lima and Andean Spanish with respect to this condition. Finally, two issues are discussed: (a) to what extent it is possible to trace a correlation between clitic doubling via object movement and the full agreement pattern and (b) to what extent these conditions on clitic doubling can be linked to Baker's (2008) Parameters of Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates cross-linguistic variation of metadiscourse in the results and discussion chapters of engineering master's theses written in English and Spanish. The analysis is based on a corpus of 200 master's thesis results and discussion chapters: 100 written by L1 English students and 100 written by L1 Spanish students. Using Hyland's (2005a) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, the results and discussion chapters were compared to examine the influence of lingua-cultural contexts of writing on student writer's employment of metadiscoursal resources. Findings of the comparative analysis reveal significant cross-linguistic differences for overall frequency of metadiscourse as well as for most (sub-)categories. The analysis suggests that interpersonal features of writing are inexorably linked to the specific lingua-cultural contexts in which texts are produced and consumed, even within the same discipline and (part-)genre. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications for L2 writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the use of Spanish nonspecific second-person subjects in oral mass-media—radio and TV—discourse as a grammatical choice endowed with a communicative potential. Traditionally-termed generic or impersonal second persons are prompted by an intention to de-subjectivize some propositional content by indexically detaching it from the particular circumstances of the speaker. In order to more clearly formalize this value, the label objectivizing second persons is proposed. Their choice in the domain of mass communication is shown to be aimed at the accomplishment of a variety of goals, sometimes including manipulation of the audience. An analysis is conducted of the frequencies with which objectivizing second-person subjects occur across different oral mass-media genres, as well as across speakers classified according to their socioprofessional ascription and sex/gender. It is concluded that the distributional patterns observed reflect the differential preference for the discursive meaning of the resource under study and its possible repercussions on speakers' images. Tackling the fact that formal choice is intrinsically linked to the generation of meaning may contribute to the development of a comprehensive, explanatory model of syntactic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Objectives: The diagnosis of mental disorders is in most cases very difficult because of the high heterogeneity and overlap between associated cognitive impairments. Furthermore, early and individualized diagnosis is crucial. In this paper, we propose a methodology to support the individualized characterization and diagnosis of cognitive impairments. The methodology can also be used as a test platform for existing theories on the causes of the impairments. We use computational cognitive modeling to gather information on the cognitive mechanisms underlying normal and impaired behavior. We then use this information to feed machine-learning algorithms to individually characterize the impairment and to differentiate between normal and impaired behavior. We apply the methodology to the particular case of specific language impairment (SLI) in Spanish-speaking children. Methods and materials: The proposed methodology begins by defining a task in which normal and individuals with impairment present behavioral differences. Next we build a computational cognitive model of that task and individualize it: we build a cognitive model for each participant and optimize its parameter values to fit the behavior of each participant. Finally, we use the optimized parameter values to feed different machine learning algorithms. The methodology was applied to an existing database of 48 Spanish-speaking children (24 normal and 24 SLI children) using clustering techniques for the characterization, and different classifier techniques for the diagnosis. Results: The characterization results show three well-differentiated groups that can be associated with the three main theories on SLI. Using a leave-one-subject-out testing methodology, all the classifiers except the DT produced sensitivity, specificity and area under curve values above 90%, reaching 100% in some cases. Conclusions: The results show that our methodology is able to find relevant information on the underlying cognitive mechanisms and to use it appropriately to provide better diagnosis than existing techniques. It is also worth noting that the individualized characterization obtained using our methodology could be extremely helpful in designing individualized therapies. Moreover, the proposed methodology could be easily extended to other languages and even to other cognitive impairments not necessarily related to language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] The paper describes three different types of headless relatives in Spanish. [•] It offers a novel analysis of them as mixed categories. [•] It deals with the similarities and differences among the three types in a principled way. [•] It opens a new path for a cross-linguistic account of headless relatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] The paper offers a unified account of the meaning of the Spanish subjunctive mood. [•] It covers a greater array of grammatical contexts than offered by previous studies. [•] Focus is on the conceptual relation between the main clause and mood choice. [•] The notion of dominion is a main tool for interpreting the subjunctive mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores the syntactic analysis of emphatic polarity particles (EPPA) in Spanish and Catalan and shows that these elements fall under a more complex paradigm than previously assumed. It is proposed that EPPA split into a high and a low pattern. We provide evidence in favour of the claim that EPPA are polar elements with an added emphatic value, and present a syntactic analysis where (i) High EPPA are merged with PolP and move to FocusP; (ii) High EPPA display WH-operator properties; (iii) The occurrence of high EPPA is constrained to root and embedded clauses that have a full-fledged left periphery, as predicted by the proposed analysis. Further understanding of EPPA syntactic hierarchy can be attained by assuming that the topmost projection of the CP domain, ForceP, is also involved in the distribution of EPPA. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper has two major goals. First, we want to critically assess the “universal free choice” (UFCA) analysis as it has been formulated in Menéndez-Benito (2010) for Spanish Free Choice Items (FCIs), while updating the dependent indefinite analysis of FCIs proposed originally in Giannakidou (1997, 2001). We find the UFCA empirically inadequate for FCIs, failing to capture their correct distribution, and making wrong predictions about their interpretation. The dependent indefinite analysis that we defend here is found to be superior empirically and conceptually. Our second goal is to distinguish the Greek, Catalan and Spanish FCI from another type of anti-specific indefinite that we call referentially vague. The English equivalent is some-or-other. Unlike the FCI, the referentially vague indefinite requires non-exhaustive variation in the value-drawing domain. In Greek, we find a referentially vague indefinite that is also a Negative Polarity Item (NPI)—and we discuss briefly a similar item in Korean. Overall, our discussion suggests that we gain a better understanding of anti-specificity phenomena such as free choice and referential vagueness if we treat them as manifestations of referential deficiency or low referentiality (as suggested in Giannakidou''s work, see also Partee, 2008), and it is unnecessary to appeal to propositional alternatives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Many patients with aphasia are bilingual or multilingual. Different variables lead to a number of patterns of recovery of the mother tongue (L1) in relation to other languages (L2, L3,…, Ln). These variables can be studied most easily when a patient speaks structurally distant languages (i.e., languages that do not share similarities). In this paper, we describe for the first time a case of Chinese–Spanish–Catalan trilingual aphasia that presents a differential recovery pattern between L1 (Mandarin Chinese) and L2 (Spanish), and L3 (Catalan). The role of learning and language-based variables in the transfer among languages is discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper we offer a syntactic description of Spanish exceptive constructions headed by excepto, salvo or menos (‘except’). Framing our hypothesis in an adjunction analysis of coordination, we argue that these exceptive markers head a Boolean Phrase, like other coordinating conjunctions. Two types of exceptive phrases can be identified, depending on the level of the constituents conjoined. In connected exceptives two DPs are conjoined. In free exceptives two CPs are conjoined; the exceptive markers select for a full-fledged CP as complement, whose null head (C) triggers a process of ellipsis in which all the syntactic material inside TP is marked for PF-deletion, except the remnant constituent(s). Our proposal supports a structural approach to ellipsis whereby elliptical constituents are in fact fully fledged though non-pronounced syntactic structures. It also supports the hypothesis that the differences in the syntactic behaviour of coordinate sentences and subordinate adverbial clauses cannot be derived from their phrase structure geometry but are instead due to the properties of individual conjunctions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper I discuss cases where there has been systematic borrowing of affixes: Spanish elements in different Quechua languages. I will try to study, in this specific case, the different processes through which suffixes have entered the language. I argue that there are four dimensions, four paths through which a Spanish suffix can be incorporated into Quechua: second language (L2)-oriented processes, universally oriented processes, first language (L1)-oriented processes, and processes in which properties of both L1 and L2 play a role. Thus the process of borrowing morphology is far from uniform. Rather, it reflects the complexity of all language contact processes, in which the four dimensions listed play a role. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, declarative intonation contours from Peruvian Spanish speakers are compared between pragmatic conditions in order to observe potential differences in the prosodic realization of contrastive focus. To do so, an acoustic feature of intonation, the fundamental frequency (F0), is examined. Since focus in Quechua is realized through the use of evidential markers, it is hypothesized that Cuzco Spanish speakers may behave differently than Lima speakers in relatively less contact with Quechua. Two intonation features have been examined with relation to contrastive focus on the subject: peak alignment and peak height. While Lima speakers demonstrate earlier and higher peaks on the subject, similar to previous reports for Madrid and Peninsular Spanish, some Cuzco speakers use fewer prosodic cues, while others rely on post-focal deaccenting alone. Also, Cuzco speakers appear to behave similarly according to whether or not they are bilingual in Spanish and Quechua. This research demonstrates how focus in realized differently in two regional varieties of Peruvian Spanish and adds to our knowledge of how language contact may contribute to the development of alternate intonation patterns in Spanish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study aims to gain in-depth understanding on whether and how asynchronous computer mediated communication (CMC), exemplified by advice giving in web-based discussion forums, is instrumental in the construction of gender identities and can thus be taken to reflect gendered discursive practices. While there is a growing body of literature on this topic, this paper extends the discussion into a less explored issue in the area of gender and advice, namely, the potential effect that the sex of the recipient may have on the linguistic structure of the message. Unlike advice-givers, advice-seekers unambiguously reveal their sex in their posts, while typically omitting other personal information or identifying features. Sex is thus the only identifiable variable. This study therefore examined how men and women are given advice – not just on how they produce advice – in terms of directness, politeness considerations and affect display. The picture that emerges is complex and points to potential changing discursive practices and gender role expectations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Named entity recognition is an important subfield of the broader research area of information extraction from textual data. Yet, named entity recognition research conducted on Turkish texts is still rare as compared to related research carried out on other languages such as English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. In this study, we present a hybrid named entity recognizer for Turkish, which is based on a manually engineered rule based recognizer that we have proposed. Since rule based systems for specific domains require their knowledge sources to be manually revised when ported to other domains, we enrich our rule based recognizer and turn it into a hybrid recognizer so that it learns from annotated data when available and improves its knowledge sources accordingly. The hybrid recognizer is originally engineered for generic news texts, but with its learning capability, it is improved to be applicable to that of financial news texts, historical texts, and child stories as well, without human intervention. Both the hybrid recognizer and its rule based predecessor are evaluated on the same corpora and the hybrid recognizer achieves better results as compared to its predecessor. The proposed hybrid named entity recognizer is significant since it is the first hybrid recognizer proposal for Turkish addressing the above porting problem considering that Turkish possesses different structural properties compared to widely studied languages such as English and there is very limited information extraction research conducted on Turkish texts. Moreover, the employment of the proposed hybrid recognizer for semantic video indexing is shown as a case study on Turkish news videos. The genuine textual and video corpora utilized throughout the paper are compiled and annotated by the authors due to the lack of publicly available annotated corpora for information extraction research on Turkish texts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is part of a broader research project on the multiple phenomena encompassed by the field of metalinguistics in Spanish. In particular, a corpus of Spanish metapragmatic idioms based on terms for parts of the body is analyzed. The main objective of the study is to describe the pragmatic behavior of this group of expressions, which occurs within three different sub-spheres (discursive organization; regulation of the interaction between speakers; modality). This analytical perspective is combined with a formal and functional approach to the corpus which completes the description of the real discursive value of each unit. Finally, in light of the particular nature of the corpus, the current pragmatic values of the idioms are related to the metaphorical and metonymical foundations that may have played a part in their process of grammaticalization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the last few decades the interpersonal nature of academic communication has been stressed in English for Academic Purposes literature. Taking metadiscourse as the analytical framework, this paper focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of interpersonally driven features in research article writing in a single discipline, Business Management. It aims at analysing to what extent the different contexts (i.e. the US international and the Spanish national) influence the strategic use of metadiscourse features in this discipline. The analysis is based on a corpus of 24 research articles from this discipline: 12 of them written in English by scholars based at North-American institutions and published in international journals, and another 12 written in Spanish by Spanish scholars and published in national journals. Significant differences are reported on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular incidence of some categories in the two sub-corpora. The particular linguistic/cultural contexts of publication seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their research articles. New knowledge appears to be interpersonally negotiated in different terms in research articles in the two cultural contexts within this disciplinary domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Since the comparative work by , we know that similar information packagings may resort to completely different formal mechanisms across languages. For instance, right-dislocation (RD) is a highly productive backgrounding strategy in Catalan, but a marginal one in English, resorting in stress shift. To our current understanding, one might take this situation to be a casual state of affairs, or rather, one may raise the stronger hypothesis that understandable and definable factors exist underlying crosslinguistic variation at the syntax/information structure interface. This enterprise has been partially pursued for typologically distant languages (e.g. Catalan vs. English vs. Finnish vs. Turkish), but unlike much recent work in syntax () very little or no attention has been paid to a microparametric comparative point. Crucially, a finer-grained comparison of closely related languages may shed light on the current hypotheses concerning the syntax/information structure interface. In this paper I will pursue this task, concentrating on the role of RD in two genetically related Romance languages: Catalan, and Spanish. My first goal is to quantify the degree of productivity of RD in these two kindred languages through a corpus based analysis. The second goal is to determine the range of formal mechanisms that Spanish resorts to in order to fulfil the discourse roles typically associated with RD in Catalan. Finally, my third goal will consist of putting forward a hypothesis to explain the factors that determine the quite different discourse management of the formal mechanisms available in these two languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, I analyze null subjects in absolute clauses (AC) in Spanish, comparing them to finite-clause null subjects and infinitival subjects. AC null subjects mostly pattern like finite-clause null subjects, but they cannot be identified by a rich inflection and they require a grammatically encoded antecedent (like some infinitival subjects). I propose that AC null subjects must be identified by a topic operator through the operation of AGREE, a matching operation between two categories in which one of them copies its values to the other. AC null subjects remain unvalued in their own clause, seeking an antecedent in the preceding clause through a mediating null topic in the absolute clause’s periphery. Finite-clause null subjects, on the other hand, are identified within their own clause by verbal morphology through the same AGREE mechanism. Two distinct ways of relating null subjects to discourse-antecedents are proposed, one for finite-clause subjects, one for absolute-clause subjects. By proposing a distinct discourse-identification process not mediated by rich agreement, this proposal opens the door to a unified theory of null referential categories, in which discourse-topic identification plays a central role. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study examines NPs in generic environments cross-linguistically. According to the semantic literature, NPs obtain generic readings from two sources: characterizing sentences (Lions are dangerous) and kind-reference (Dodo birds are extinct). English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are known to differ in the types of NPs (definite vs. indefinite; singular vs. plural) that are allowed in the two types of environments, but there is disagreement in the literature concerning (i) the status of bare (article-less) NPs in generic environments in Brazilian Portuguese; and (ii) whether singular and/or plural generics are restricted to canonical kinds cross-linguistically. The broader goal of this paper is to use experimental methodology to resolve these disagreements; the more specific goal is to test the theoretical proposal of , which makes testable predictions for the distribution of generic NPs cross-linguistically. The results of Acceptability Judgment Tasks with native speakers of English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese provide support for Dayal''s proposal that plural generics cross-linguistically denote kinds, while definite singular generics denote taxonomic entities. These findings highlight the value of experimentally testing the predictions of semantic theories, and pose questions for further research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the complex interplay between phrasal prosody, syntax, and meaning in English and Spanish, and explores its implication for second language acquisition (SLA). We present L2 data from L1 Spanish/L2 English learners which indicate that moving from syntax to prosody to encode the thetic/categorical distinction is far more challenging than moving from syntax to prosody to align the focused constituent with Nuclear Stress. On the other hand, L2 data from L1 English/L2 Spanish learners indicate that moving from prosody to syntax to encode the thetic/categorical distinction is far less challenging than moving from prosody to syntax to align the focused constituent with Nuclear Stress. We offer a grammatical account of this seemingly contradictory situation, in support of the view that second language learners acquire a grammatical system rather than isolated patterns. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper focuses on how students from China are institutionally constructed through everyday practice in a Madrid middle school, where three years’ fieldwork was conducted as part of a wider research project. Particular attention is paid to the Welcome Programme at this school, a new educational measure intended for students from a migrant background to learn Spanish before they enter mainstream classes. Taking critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a theoretical/methodological/analytical framework, interactional, discursive, and ethnographic data are used to show (a) what social identities are (re)produced and challenged through school practices, in connection with the ideological framework of the modern nation-state; (b) how these practices contribute to legitimizing a particular distribution/valuation of cultural and linguistic resources within the contemporary Spanish educational system; (c) what the institutional consequences are for these Chinese newcomer students. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to study possible differences between the processing of inflectional vs. derivational morphology in Spanish word recognition using electrophysiological measures. A lexical decision task to target words preceded by morphological-related (or unrelated) primes was used. The orthographic and phonological overlap and the grammatical class for the two experimental conditions were exactly the same. Examples of the related conditions were, for inflection, NIÑO-NIÑA (“girl”-“boy”), and for derivation, RAMO-RAMA (“bunch”-“branch”). These conditions were compared with unrelated pairs without orthographic, phonological or semantic relationships. An attenuation of the N-400 component was found for both related conditions from 300ms until 450ms (until 500ms for inflections only). In addition, different locations were suggested by the source analysis. These findings are consistent with accounts that argue for differences between the processing of inflections and derivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper a conversation analysis approach is adopted as the basis for a qualitative study of the adverbial phrase muy bien, which is widely employed in evaluative and polite contexts in standard Spanish. The study shows how this expression has expanded its range of functions to act as a discourse marker in the vernacular Spanish of Castellón (Spain). In spoken discourse, muy bien has a number of different uses. For instance, it can function as an affirmative answer in reactive interventions, or as a signal of self-confirmation or self-correction in initiative turns. Moreover, it also has other metadiscursive functions such as that of introducing new topics or redirecting old ones. The multifunctionality of this adverbial phrase is a consequence of a process of pragmaticalization, that is to say, a semantic blurring away from the referential meaning towards more procedural and discursive ones in different conversational contexts. Furthermore, the issue of formal and semantic convergence with oral Catalan (in its Valencian variety) is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of the introductory sections of a corpus of 20 doctoral theses on computing written in Spanish and in English. Our aim was to ascertain whether the theses, produced within the same scientific-technological area but by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, employed the same rhetorical strategies to introduce the work presented. The analysis follows the Swalesian approach and is based on a move/step/sub-step model proposed for PhD introductions in Spanish (). The Spanish academic conventions appear to be that move 1 (M1-Establishing the Territory) and move 3 (M3-Occupying the Niche) are obligatory moves in PhD thesis introductions in Spanish, while move 2 (M2-Establishing the Niche) is optional. The structure of English thesis introductions reveals that they conform more closely to the M1–M2–M3 arrangement. Moreover, combinations of moves and patterns, cyclicity and embedding make their organisation more complex. The step analysis suggests that introductions in both languages rely mainly on the presentation of background information and the work carried out. However, the English introductions tend to stress the writer’s own work, its originality and its contribution to the field of study. They also present more embedding and overlapping of steps and sub-steps than the Spanish texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In contrast with previous analyses where ya has been disjunctively characterized as a temporal adverb, an aspectual and a discourse marker this paper offers a unified account as a complex grounding predication () that anchors the event with respect to the time of speech subsuming the evolutionary momentum of the event to be mapped against cultural frames. Unlike deictic markers, ya does not situate events, relations, entities or attributes by projecting them onto an objective socio-physical or temporal axis. It rather gives them a dynamic orientation by mapping them onto a programmatic base, often a cyclic one. Ya validates future or past events as most prominent for the time of speech as compared to surrounding ones that may be part of a larger action or an event chain. Ya is therefore best analyzed as a meta-linguistic focus marker that influences the conceptualization of the underlying base: it acknowledges progression within a process conceived of as globally oriented. In oral speech, ya is typically used to frame perception and propositional attitude predicates. In written language, it contributes to the framing of discourse structure at various levels of organization, especially when it comes to reflect the intertwining of parallel scenarios. The subjective perspective manifested by ya primarily relates to the course of time – the universal programmatic base par excellence – however, it also expresses more sophisticated time managing capacities and the specific mental ability of bridging gaps in linguistic representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper aims to show that metaphors are a powerful tool to frame economic issues and serve certain political interests. To this purpose, we have carried out a comparative study of the conceptual metaphors of the Global Systemic Crisis in both English and Spanish. The financial crisis has indeed caused havoc in the economic panorama worldwide. Spain has been no exception, but, unlike other European countries, financial problems were initially belittled by the Spanish mass media for several months, until the subsequent outbreak of the crisis in relatively recent times. Following the current trend of corpus approaches to metaphor analysis (), our study is based on a corpus of English and Spanish financial articles selected from those published during 2007 and the end of 2008 in the English journal The Economist and the Spanish newspaper El Economista. The analysis of the metaphors used in these articles will allow us to show how the same economic reality may be differently conceptualized at different points in time on account of different socio-political factors, such as a Government which, on the verge of national elections, refused to reveal the grim state of affairs of the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: proposed a prototype semantic analysis of the English word lie, arguing that a ‘good’ lie is one containing three basic elements and that utterances lacking one or more element might still be considered lies but to lesser degrees. The present study replicated their questionnaire by applying it to Spanish in Eastern Ecuador. This paper examines whether or not the concept of a lie is different for Spanish and, if so, to what degree and under what semantic prototypical notions. The questions addressed are (1) if lie is a word in Spanish whose definition involves a prototype in the sense discussed by Coleman and Kay; (2) if there is a prototype containing the three elements considered; (3) how participants assign the word lie to reported speech acts; and (4) whether speakers generally agree on the relative weights of semantic elements. The general notion of a prototype is revealed in the Spanish data; however, the order of semantic elements is different from English. It is also argued that pragmatic and cultural considerations are more important, particularly with respect to social lies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In spite of the well-established idea that language contact is fundamental for explaining language change, this aspect has been remarkably absent in most studies of color term evolution. This paper discusses the changes in the color system of Yurakaré (unclassified, Bolivia) that have occurred during the last 200 years, as a result of intensive contact with Spanish language and culture. Developing the new theoretical concept of ‘updating’, we will show that different contexts have resulted in qualitatively different changes to the color system of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The present study reports on an acoustic analysis of alveolar laterals in two contact languages (Catalan and Spanish) as produced by two groups of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals (Catalan-dominant and Spanish-dominant) residing on Majorca. Catalan alveolar laterals have been reported to be “darker” (i.e. velarized) than Spanish ones. Recent sociophonetic research has suggested that Catalan and Spanish are gradually converging in this phonetic feature due to intensive contact and that laterals are sociolinguistically salient in Majorca. This paper examines the potential interactions between the social-indexical role of laterals in Majorca and the abilities of bilinguals to maintain two separate acoustic distributions for laterals in their two languages. First, it is shown that bilinguals tend to transfer the phonetic features of the sound categories of their native language to their non-native one even after having had early and extensive exposure to native input in their non-dominant language. Second, it is shown that while most bilinguals maintain two separate acoustic distributions for the laterals in their two languages, some participants do not. Social-indexical and cognitive factors that could explain this finding are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents an examination of the expression of subject and topic in conversation, using parameters established by Centering Theory. Based on a corpus analysis of English and Spanish casual conversations, we show (i) under what circumstances the subject and the topic of an utterance coincide (‘topic’ is defined, according to Centering, as the backward-looking center of an utterance); and (ii) what referring expressions are used to encode subject and topic. We found that the Cb is realized as subject most of the time (80% of the utterances in English and 73% in Spanish), showing that topichood and subjecthood tend to be assigned to the same entity. The preferred realization for the Cb in those cases is a pronoun in English and a zero pronoun in Spanish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a series of spoken language identification experiments involving Spanish and Basque. Spanish and Basque are both official languages in the Basque Country, a region located in northern Spain. We focused our research on the study of several phonotactic-based methodologies, analysing at the same time the performance of phonotactic models trained from text and speech samples and the use of phone and phone sequences as decoding units. Although we focus mainly on Spanish–Basque identification, the analysis is later extended to English, so that more generic conclusions can be drawn. From the bilingual results, we can conclude that the text-based phonotactic models can perform similarly to the audio-based ones when applied to read speech. Moreover, when using task-specific information it is also possible to achieve a high accuracy. The use of phone sequences as decoding units results, in most of the cases, in a decrease in performance and appears to be useful when constraining the phone decoders to those sequences. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the trilingual experiments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper formal accounts of nominal ellipsis are compared with information-structural approaches in the light of Spanish data. It is first shown that empty nominals in this language are not subject to formal conditions, such as proper government by a functional category and/or identification by strong agreement. It is then proposed that nominal ellipsis obeys a focus condition, whereby the remnant of ellipsis selects a relevant alternative or subset in a contextually given set of equivalent alternatives. This condition will allow us to explain, in particular, why certain determiners and kinds of adjectives are excluded in Spanish elliptical DPs. Finally, a technical implementation of this idea is offered combining feature assignment at the stage of lexical insertion with PF and LF interpretation of the features involved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper proposes a new analysis of Spanish verb forms. It works from a general assumption in the Spanish literature that the Spanish verb consists of a root followed by a verb theme marker; these are followed by tense/aspect/mood and finally by person/number. While this structure is often transparent, there are cases where it is unclear, leading to a variety of previous analyses. Problematic cases are accounted for here without violating this order of morphemes. The proposal is compared with the classical analysis by Harris and with a recent one by Arregi. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Romance languages make use of topicalisation as a grammatical strategy to mark [−focus] constituents, typically under Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD). As a distinctive property, topicalisation involves clitic resumption (CR) of the dislocated constituent in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages (French, Spanish, Catalan). However, a great deal of variation is found in regard to the actual realisation of the resumptive clitic, which is traditionally explained by assuming that CR is optional. In Italian, CR of topic constituents proves to be optional with all phrases, except with direct objects and partitive complements. By contrast, the presence of a resumptive clitic is strictly required in all dislocation structures involving verbal arguments in other Romance varieties, such as Catalan and Sicilian. The aim of this paper is to identify the syntactic properties and the pragmatics characterisation of dislocation constructions lacking CR, and to account for the apparent optionality and the variation found across Romance. We claim that there are no optional nor null clitics, and that non-resumed dislocation actually corresponds to structures other than CLLD/CLRD, as suggested by the fact that the constructions lacking CR exhibit a wide range of syntactic differences with respect to the clitic-resumed counterparts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]