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Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research 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 Cuadernos de Lingüística de el Colegio de México 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.)

In many languages, the present perfect has grammaticalized, gradually displacing the preterit. Within Spanish, this has been documented with the grammaticalization of the present perfect in Peninsular Spanish. To examine this possibility in two Latin American varieties, this study examined present perfect/preterit variation of 36 speakers from Lima and Mexico City from the PRESEEA corpus. While Lima Spanish presented overall more present perfect than Mexico City Spanish, a similar internal constraint hierarchy is predictive of present perfect use in both speech communities. However, Lima Spanish demonstrated a change in progress toward an expansion of the preterit among younger speakers with the indeterminate temporal reference as locus of change. The findings suggest that present perfect grammaticalization may not always be the most common cross-linguistic pathway but rather is subject to source constraints, which may lead to another pathway in which the preterit expands at the expense of the present perfect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationships between lexical development and inhibition, as well as morphosyntax and inhibition, in typically developing monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Recent studies of the relationship between lexical development and inhibition suggest that, as the size of the lexicon increases, so does inhibitory ability. However, the relationship between grammar and inhibition seems more controversial. The work distinguishing the relationships between inhibition and lexicon vs. grammar have been carried out in English, which has relatively impoverished inflectional morphology. Because the relationships considered in the literature are hypothetically not language-particular to English, but rather claims about cognition in general, we would expect to find that they also hold in other languages, including languages with richer morphology, such as Spanish. These considerations led us to ask the following: are expressive and receptive measures of the lexicon and morphosyntax predictive of typically developing monolingual child Spanish-speakers' inhibitory ability? A sample of 82 monolingual, typically developing Spanish-speaking children in Mexico City were tested with 5 lexical measures, 4 morphosyntax measures, and the Flanker Task measure of inhibition. Results showed that all lexical and morphosyntactic variables correlated significantly with Flanker (p < 0.01), except for Number of Different Words (NDW), calculated on the spontaneous production sample. Therefore, inhibition is predicted by lexical development in child Spanish. Additionally, an ever-increasing set of competitor morphological forms requires an ever-increasing inhibitory ability as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the efforts at the Daniel Cosio Villegas Library of Colegio de Mexico (Mexico) to create a Spanish language authority file on its ALEPH online system. To date, the authorities team, composed of about ten librarians, have created over 10,000 name authorities, and close to 4,000 subject authorities in MARC format, closely following the structure of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) records. For the subject authority file, it was decided to establish three levels of description, all of which include the LCSH English term. In order to establish the term in Spanish, seven official sources have been used, with Bilindex (1984) having the highest usage, closely followed by subject headings list developed by Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cienfificas (CSIC) of Spain. As the first Mexican NACO/SACO participants, librarians at the Colegio de Mexico Library also received training by personnel from the Library of Congress in the creation and validation of subject headings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the linguistic and sociolinguistic distribution of future forms (morphological -FM- or periphrastic variants -FP-) in 1519 examples from 36 speakers, a fraction in the materials included in the Sociolinguistic corpus of Mexico City. Main results are three: 1) even though FM is still alive in Mexico City, its use is residual in several ways; 2) more significant variables are referred to the sort of variation between forms, temporal distance, epistemic character, presence of a negative domain, school years and age, among others; 3) the process -a change from below- is in its last steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both children and adults tend to produce predicates with lexical aspect, grammatical aspect and tense in particular prototypical combinations. While it has been argued that these prototypes constitute the linguistic knowledge that children have of tense, others argue that they are independent dimensions of knowledge, even in child language, and that the prototypical groupings of these dimensions in child language fall together for non-linguistic cognitive reasons. Recent studies of child Spanish suggest non-adult-like use of verb finiteness. In light of these facts, we seek to determine whether Spanish-speaking children are also delayed in their comprehension of prototypical tense and aspect combinations. Twenty-three Spanish-speaking children (mean age = 3;10) from Mexico City were given a comprehension task and scored on their ability to select a picture corresponding to different tense-aspect combinations. Children were largely able to successfully interpret tense and aspect information as it was conveyed in the adult-like cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]