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Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish)/ uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish)/alguns (Portuguese) type. The paper concentrates on four properties: semantic plurality, positive polarity, partitivity, and event distribution. The logic underlying the analysis is that of compositionality, applied at the subword level: as items become bigger in form (with the addition of morphemes), they also acquire more semantic properties. The paper proposes the "indefinite hierarchy", which establishes a set of components for languages to build their indefinites with, in a particular order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that Langacker’s definition of grounding predications is problematic for languages other than English. The idea that in English tense and modal auxiliaries are mutually exclusive grounding elements leads Langacker (1990, 2003) to consider both deontic and epistemic modal auxiliaries as grounding predications, whereas he excludes German modals from being so on the basis of their tense inflection. In this paper I contend that, unlike the deontic modal verbs, and despite their tense marking, Spanish epistemic modals deber ‘must’, poder ‘may’ and tener que ‘have to’ are certainly appropriate for modal grounding due to their reference point function and to the subjectification they undergo. I show that deontic modality is more affected by temporal grounding than epistemic modality. Moreover, the impossibility of inserting an inchoative verb such as ir a ‘to be going to’ corroborates the theoretical underpinning that Spanish epistemic modals effect an epistemic grounding similar to that of the grounding predications in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses some of the conceptual and semantic properties of entering events in the construction entrar en / a `enter in / to' in Spanish. The first part focuses on the question of how entering events are conceptualised in this language. Recent studies on entering events (Kita 1999) have shown that some of the semantic primitives considered central to the conceptualisation of motion are not necessarily present in all languages. Our starting point will be to test the validity of this argument in Spanish. We will show that Spanish entering events do depict a motion process from one point into another with a boundary crossing involved in most cases. However, we will also argue that the way in which this event is conceptualised varies with respect to two parameters: force dynamics (Talmy 1988) and profiling of events (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2000). The second part deals with the semantic differences brought up by the alternation of the prepositions a and en with the verb entrar. In previous analyses (Morera 1988:149; Gili Gaya 1990:254; Menéndez Pidal 1944:347; Roegiest 1980:94), the difference between choosing a or en was reduced to a diatopical variation based on a higher or lesser degree of dynamism. We will argue that the choice of preposition triggers other semantic interpretations where mechanisms such as metonymy, deixis, and scope play a fundamental role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín de Filología is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The question of whether different linguistic patterns differentially influence semantic and conceptual representations is of central interest in cognitive science. In this paper, we investigate whether the regular encoding of shape within a nominal classification system leads to an increased salience of shape in speakers' semantic representations by comparing English, (Amazonian) Spanish, and Bora, a shape-based classifier language spoken in the Amazonian regions of Columbia and Peru. Crucially, in displaying obligatory use, pervasiveness in grammar, high discourse frequency, and phonological variability of forms corresponding to particular shape features, the Bora classifier system differs in important ways from those in previous studies investigating effects of nominal classification, thereby allowing better control of factors that may have influenced previous findings. In addition, the inclusion of Spanish monolinguals living in the Bora village allowed control for the possibility that differences found between English and Bora speakers may be attributed to their very different living environments. We found that shape is more salient in the semantic representation of objects for speakers of Bora, which systematically encodes shape, than for speakers of English and Spanish, which do not. Our results are consistent with assumptions that semantic representations are shaped and modulated by our specific linguistic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 argues that the difference between connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in specificational copular sentences is heavily influenced by semantics and information structure. It shows that anti-connectivity effects with respect to binding disappear when the influence of information structure is neutralized, whereas anti-connectivity effects with respect to scope result from the semantics of specificational sentences. These data lead to the conclusion that anti-connectivity effects cannot be used as evidence against a syntax-based approach to specificational sentences and binding, that the analysis of specificational sentences should include both a syntactic and a semantic device, and that the syntactic analysis of specificational sentences should rely crucially on their information structure. I present and adopt Heycock & Kroch's (2002) analysis for specificational sentences, in which connectivity effects result from the assembling of ground and focus. The fact that connectivity effects are also exhibited by verb-object-subject word order in French and Spanish, which is marked for the ground-focus partition, is presented as an important piece of independent evidence in favor of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper describes the design of a 192-text Spanish-English specialized corpus of biomedical research articles (RAs) divided into three 64-text subcorpora (English texts, their corresponding Spanish translations, and Spanish comparable texts) for use in quantitative contrastive analysis. The paper also presents an exploratory study analysing theme–rheme structure in these subcorpora. Two definitions of theme were used: Halliday’s ideational theme and preverbal theme (i.e., all clause constituents before the finite verb of the main clause). The study adopted a target-oriented approach and assessed the acceptability of the translated texts with regard to the statistical norm of the comparable native-speaker Spanish subcorpus. Statistically significant differences were found for marked theme and its different syntactic manifestations (prepositional phrase adjunct and subordinate clauses) and there was evidence of a different thematic distribution within the semantic category person (researcher, patient, first person). The most striking results were found for different measures of theme length, suggesting a consistent information overload in the thematic zone in the whole RA and in the individual rhetorical sections except for the Introduction. The translated texts occupy a kind of no-man’s land half-way between the source articles and the independently created Spanish RAs. A refined three-stage model of the study design is proposed for future target-oriented quantitative and qualitative research into translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we focus on an eventual convergence outcome (the pluralization of presentational haber/haver-hi) in the grammar of two Romance languages, Spanish and Catalan, which have been living side-by-side for centuries in Eastern Spain. Taking into account the sociolinguistic comparative method and on the basis of several representative corpora of the two languages in contact, the data from this research offer evidence that points to a notable congruence between the underlying grammars of both languages, which would, at least partially, account for a similar diffusion of these vernacular pluralizations. Moreover, some of the few cases of disagreement found can be explained on the basis of both internal (such as the existence of points of structural conflict in some verbal paradigms) and external factors (such as hypercorrection), which certain social groups particularly sensitive to normative pressure are more receptive to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides and explains a data sheet to analyse the attenuation from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view. The theoretical and methodological basis are established to create a common project to study the attenuation in the different varieties of Spanish and Portuguese (ES.POR.ATENUACION). The data sheet results from preliminary research based on a discursive corpus analysis and it proposes solutions for problems the analyst may face when recognising attenuation devices, especially those that come from situational factors. This present project aims at achieving homogeneity among the researchers in the pragmatic attenuation analysis, both qualitative and quantitative. Once particular analysis are carried out, we will focus on comparative and contrastive studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, succession documents translation is one of the most frequent translation briefs. This matter takes on particular importance in countries with a high immigration rate, and that is the case of Spain: as a consequence of immigration of English-speaking people, many legal and sworn (English<>Spanish) translations of testamentary instruments are carried out. In order to achieve this, the knowledge of textual and structural features of legal and family documents in general, and in succession documents in particular becomes essential. This paper reports on the findings of one study whose purpose was to analyse the macrostructure of succession instruments. Our research corpus consists of 90 wills in electronic format: 30 Spanish, 30 for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 30 Scottish. Our analysis results show striking differences in the macrostructure (and grammar) of the legal genre analysed in the legal systems aforementioned. We suggest that the knowledge of macrostructural differences of a complex text genre such as the will contributes to carrying out its bi-directional translation: not only with direct directionality (English-Spanish) but also with reverse directionality (Spanish-English), highly demanded in the current professional market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the present paper “Similarities between Comparative and Exclamative Degree Markers: French ce and Spanish lo”, we first analyse the so-called pseudo-relativized phrasal comparative construction X que ce que P in French and X de lo que P in Spanish. We after compare the pseudo-relativized phrasal comparative construction properties with the properties of the exclamative French construction Ce que P! and of the Spanish one ¡Lo X que P ! whose form, degree reading, and some syntactic and semantic features are similar. We eventually conclude about the nature of que/que, introducing both subordinate constructions, as a complementizer (and not a Wh- item). [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]

Recent second language (L2) acquisition research has proposed that purely syntactic features are easier to acquire and less vulnerable than ones involving the interfaces (Sorace, 2004; Serratrice et al. 2004). The present paper addresses this issue by investigating the acquisition of the Spanish personal preposition a in English L2 learners of Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the specificity/definiteness of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and verb semantics (Torrego 1998; Zagona 2002). 33 English L2 learners of Spanish of different proficiency levels, and 14 Spanish controls participated in an acceptability judgement task. The results showed significant differences between native speakers and L2 learners of all proficiency levels, who performed at chance, and support the claim that L2 learners have difficulties acquiring structures involving the syntax/semantics interface. However, the advanced learners showed sensitivity to the least complex condition providing evidence that interface phenomena may be acquirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a tool for the classification of domain-specific intraterm relations. It thus aims to present both the process and the product of classifying these relations. First, a description is given of how semantic relations and — more specifically — intraterm relations are understood and represented. Then, a structured set of relational schemas is presented, based mainly on insights from cognitive semantics and functional linguistics. Finally, the general model is applied to the semantic classification of complex terms. This step is specific in several ways: in the type of relation (internal semantic relations of complex terms), in the subject field (ceramic tile manufacturing) and in the languages analysed (German and Spanish). The advantage of this procedure is that, if applied to different subject fields, the resulting classifications can reach a high degree of specificity, but they are nonetheless comparable due to the fact that they will be based on a common theoretical background and methodology of classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural -n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n 'Do it!', in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. We reassess some of Kayne's arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desideratum of any general analysis of such phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality constraint on the positioning of the plural affix, and we develop constraints on these operations that situate interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Medicine & Science of Physical Activity & Sport / Revista Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte is the property of Revista Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Fisica y del Deporte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although both constituent order and variation in the expression of pronominal subjects are well-established research topics in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, the placement of pronominal subjects has received relatively little attention in previous research. The goal of the present study is to fill this gap by examining postverbal pronominal subjects in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese using data from the Corpus del Español and Corpus do Português, taking into account such factors as verb semantics and transitivity. It is shown that the factors affecting the placement of pronominal subjects differ from those related to nominal subjects, as pronouns typically represent old information in discourse. Pronominal subjects are relatively uncommon in the postverbal position in both languages, but especially in European Portuguese where they appear mostly in grammaticalized constructions (e.g. quotatives). The postverbal placement of pronominal subjects is often related to non-topical status of the subject and serves a backgrounding function in discourse. It is most frequently associated with twoargument verbs characterized by low transitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that idiomatic constructions basically involve non-compositional meanings (Katz and Postal 1963; Fraser 1970; Chomsky 1980, among others) or special syntax-semantics correspondences (cf. Jackendoff 1990, 1997a, b, 2002). However, we agree with those linguists who claim that there are aspects of idioms that are compositional (Marantz 1996, 1997; Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994). In this article, on the one hand, assuming Hale and Keyser's (2002) configurational theory of argument structure, we show that a class of idiomatic constructions which can be found in both “satellite-framed languages” like English and “verb-framed languages” like Catalan and Spanish (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000) involves different applications of a lexical syntactic process of conflation. Unlike Jackendoff (1990, 1997a), we argue that the relevant crosslinguistic variation must be expressed in l(exical)-syntactic terms rather than via correspondence rules. On the other hand, assuming Marantz's (1996, 1997) division of labor between the computational system and the encyclopedia, we show the relevance of syntactic argument structures in structuring the compositional meaning of an idiomatic construction, and that of distinguishing between syntactically transparent compositional meanings and syntactically non-transparent non-compositional ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research asked whether speakers are influenced by systematic semantic patterns in their language in forming new word meanings. We used the novel word mapping technique (Nagy and Gentner 1990) to test whether English and Spanish speakers would show effects of their differing semantic systems in inferring the meanings of novel motion verbs. We also tested for any language-specific effects in inferring novel nouns. Participants were given short passages containing either a novel noun or a novel motion verb, and were asked to infer the meaning of the novel word. The passages provided information about both the path and the manner of a novel motion event. Consistent with the semantic patterns in the respective languages, English speakers were more likely to infer a manner interpretation than a path interpretation and Spanish speakers showed the reverse pattern. Language-specific effects were not found for the meanings inferred for novel nouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the contribution of grammatical gender to integrating depicted nouns into sentences during on-line comprehension, and whether semantic congruity and gender agreement interact using two tasks: naming and semantic judgement of pictures. Native Spanish speakers comprehended spoken Spanish sentences with an embedded line drawing, which replaced a noun that either made sense or not with the preceding sentence context and either matched or mismatched the gender of the preceding article. In Experiment 1a (picture naming) slower naming times were found for gender mismatching pictures than matches, as well as for semantically incongruous pictures than congruous ones. In addition, the effects of gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted; specifically, pictures that were both semantically incongruous and gender mismatching were named slowest, but not as slow as if adding independent delays from both violations. Compared with a neutral baseline, with pictures embedded in simple command sentences like "Now please say ____", both facilitative and inhibitory effects were observed. Experiment 1b replicated these results with low-cloze gender-neutral sentences, more similar in structure and processing demands to the experimental sentences. In Experiment 2, participants judged a picture's semantic fit within a sentence by button-press; gender agreement and semantic congruity again interacted, with gender agreement having an effect on congruous but not incongruous pictures. Two distinct effects of gender are hypothesised: a "global" predictive effect (observed with and without overt noun production), and a "local" inhibitory effect (observed only with production of gender-discordant nouns). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an application of C. S. Peirce's system of the Universal Categories (UC) of existence to the traditional problems of syntactic functions of the clitics of the American Spanish language. Discussion on Peirce's UC in terms of personal pronouns; Analysis of the reflexive clitic se; Variations of the direct reflexive use of se; Reciprocity in se; Reflexive marks in intransitive and copulative verbs.

Discusses comitative constructions in the Spanish language. Syntactic and semantic restrictions on Spanish comitatives; Derivation of the semantic restriction from a structural asymmetry; Relation between the restriction on collectivity and the constraint against nonsubjects.

The distribution of Spanish focused and depreciative bare plurals presents a problem for standard syntactic accounts within the Government & Binding paradigm, either based on the notion of government or on incorporation mechanisms. It is argued that a minimalist account is superior to the previous ones because the licensing of focused and depreciative bare plurals can be integrated in the general theory of feature movement. This operation takes place in constituent structures allowing multiple specifiers and relating the focus feature with other features of the D and the C systems. Evidence is provided of the checking of a focus feature in these two domains, a fact that supports the symmetric pattern of licensing of focused (and depreciative) hare plurals in matrix and embedded contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article postulates three grades or types of emphatic meaning in Spanish, Czech and Russian. These are: basic contextual differentiation between rheme and theme; emphasis in the proper sense of the word, i.e. a meaning of the relatively greater importance than usual of either rheme or theme of the sentence; and emotional emphasis. All of the compared languages have a considerable amount of analogical devices: word order, stress, intonation, singling-out-constructions, lexical means, repetition. The different systematic possibilities to be found especially in the use of word order in Spanish on one side and in Russian and Czech on the other, are reflected structurally in the specific functions that are fulfilled by the singling-out-constructions in these languages.