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Audio description is an access service that translates visuals into words which are then received auditorily by end users. This article aims to compare audio descriptions created by professionals and by students in Spanish, in order to identify commonalities and divergences, if any. Part of the VIW corpus is used to that end. Although limited in size, the VIW corpus is the first open-access multilingual multimodal corpus of audio descriptions, including various audio descriptions of the same visual input, namely the short film "What happens while". The analysis presented in this paper focuses on quantitative data such as the number of words, number of AD units and sentences, as well as on the distribution of word classes. Where relevant, data are compared to general language corpora so as to highlight the specificities of the language of audio description. The paper also compares the most frequent words used by both groups, and a selection of semantic classes automatically retrieved is analysed. This article provides new insights into the language of audio description and shows the research potential of the VIW corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender bias is affecting many natural language processing applications. While we are still far from proposing debiasing methods that will solve the problem, we are making progress analyzing the impact of this bias in current algorithms. This paper provides an extensive study of the underlying gender bias in popular contextualized word embeddings. Our study provides an insightful analysis of evaluation measures applied to several English data domains and the layers of the contextualized word embeddings. It is also adapted and extended to the Spanish language. Our study points out the advantages and limitations of the various evaluation measures that we are using and aims to standardize the evaluation of gender bias in contextualized word embeddings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the first written sources containing information about the Poqomchi' language (Mayan family, Guatemala) is the trilingual Poqomchi'-Spanish-Latin dictionary dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its author was a Dominican missionary, Dionisio de Zúñiga, although his work is based on earlier dictionaries of his predecessors. This paper analyses Zúñiga's dictionary in the context of Dominican evangelizing tradition. Whereas the descriptions of certain lexical entries prove that the author was familiar with the culture and customs of the Poqomchi' people, some other terms, specifically those denoting pre-Columbian deities and native religious concepts, seem to be derived from earlier missionary texts including Domingo de Vico's famous Theologia Indorum. These intertextualities confirm the intellectual continuity among Dominican missionaries in Highland Guatemala during the early colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to revisit the so-called aspectual se, frequently cited over the last three decades as a new function of reflexive pronouns in Spanish and other languages, which refers to facultative uses of the reflexive pronoun where it has no effect on the valency or diathesis of the verb. I will focus on four empirical problems that such accounts face when dealing with corpus data: the requirement of a delimited object for transitive verbs, the semantic implications of the aspectual function of the reflexive pronoun, the unacceptability of the reflexive pronoun with some predicates, and the fact that these accounts have ignored a number of predicates that also take this facultative reflexive pronoun. I argue that a larger sample of both contexts and verbs, obtained by exhaustively analyzing corpus data, is necessary to improve our understanding of these uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. Utilizing family health history in cancer prevention holds promise in lessening the burden of cancer. Nevertheless, family health history is underutilized in public health and preventive medicine. Community health workers, also known as lay health educators, are ideal candidates to offer basic cancer family history-based education and services to the general public. The authors developed the first cancer family history-based genomics training program in cancer prevention tailored for community health workers. This paper details the development and pilot testing findings of the training. Specifically, a multidisciplinary research team of geneticists, genetic counselors, health educators, community health workers, and community health worker instructors developed a 7-module, 6-hour, bilingual (English and Spanish) cancer family history-based training focusing on cancer family history-based risk assessment, lifestyle recommendations, and genetic evaluation and testing. The curriculum was based on an integrated theoretical framework, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, the community health worker core competencies, and the 4MAT instructional model. The Texas Department of State Health Services approved and certified the curriculum with 2 delivery formats: in-person/face-to-face workshops and online training. A total of 34 community health workers completed the pilot training in person (n=17) and online (n=17) in 2018 and 2019. Participating community health workers' knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy, and intention in delivering basic cancer family history-based genomics education and services significantly increased on the immediate post-test measures compared with their pretest data. Positive ratings and feedback were also reported by the community health workers. Findings from this pilot study suggest that wider training is warranted for educating more community health workers in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering that Digital Information and Communication Technologies (DICTs) are integrated into the development of our daily actions, including those that belong to the school environment, it is necessary to reflect on the possibilities of use that they offer inside and outside schools. Thus, we understand that the school context is one of those responsible for showing learners the possibilities to act in virtual contexts. In language teaching, for example, it is up to it to encourage new literate practices through the perception of DICTs as tools that enable self-knowledge and autonomy in learning. In this sense, this paper proposes to briefly discuss the role of digital literacy for autonomous learning of foreign languages, notably the Spanish language. This text presents the results of a qualitative research that aimed to identify how a group of adolescents sees and uses TDICs to learn Spanish independently. Participants were randomly selected from high school students at a Brazilian federal public school. The "digital microliteracy" concept proposed in here seeks to afford the analyzes of how these apprentices perceive the possibilities that the virtual environment can offer them in relation to the autonomous learning of the Spanish language. It was possible to verify that the agents surveyed realized that the DICTs are agents that provide interaction between peoples of other nationalities, thus promoting interculturality, but at the same time needed more guidance on how to use them effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the Mio Cid epithet, most widely associated with the Castilian warrior exile Rodrigo Díaz and traditionally believed to have been bestowed upon him by Arabic speakers, is in fact an autochthonous Castilian formula closely related to equivalent hybrid formulas such as Mi Anaya and Mi Echa. Close attention to the charters of the Northern Meseta allows us to flesh out a small but significant corpus of such references and also observe such names being used in a second idiosyncratic way as generic witnesses. By framing the Mio Cid usage within this broader onomastic tradition, a more solid geography and chronology emerge and these in turn indicate a relatively widespread use of such terms in late eleventh and early twelfth-century Castile, initially in aristocratic circles, before the epithets morphed into personal names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the Natural Language Processing community have been moving from uncontextualized word embeddings towards contextualized word embeddings. Among these contextualized architectures, BERT stands out due to its capacity to compute bidirectional contextualized word representations. However, its competitive performance in English downstream tasks is not obtained by its multilingual version when it is applied to other languages and domains. This is especially true in the case of the Spanish language used in Twitter. In this work, we propose TWiLBERT, a specialization of BERT architecture both for the Spanish language and the Twitter domain. Furthermore, we propose a Reply Order Prediction signal to learn inter-sentence coherence in Twitter conversations, which improves the performance of TWilBERT in text classification tasks that require reasoning on sequences of tweets. We perform an extensive evaluation of TWilBERT models on 14 different text classification tasks, such as irony detection, sentiment analysis, or emotion detection. The results obtained by TWilBERT outperform the state-of-the-art systems and Multilingual BERT. In addition, we carry out a thorough analysis of the TWilBERT models to study the reasons of their competitive behavior. We release the pre-trained TWilBERT models used in this paper, along with a framework for training, evaluating, and fine-tuning TWilBERT models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the findings of the Neuropsychological Norms for the U.S.-Mexico Border Region in Spanish (NP-NUMBRS) Project and offers a roadmap for future research. The NP-NUMBRS project represents the largest and most comprehensive co-normed neuropsychological battery to date for native Spanish-speaking healthy adults from the U.S. (California/Arizona)-Mexico borderland region (N = 254; ages 19–60 years). These norms provide demographic adjustments for tests across numerous domains (i.e., verbal fluency, processing speed, attention/working memory, executive function, episodic memory [learning and delayed recall], visuospatial, and fine motor skills). This project: 1) shows that the NP-NUMBRS norms consistently outperformed previously published norms for English-speaking non-Hispanic (White and African-American) adults in identifying impairment; 2) explores the role of Spanish-English bilingualism in test performance; and 3) provides support for the diagnostic validity of these norms in detecting HIV-associated neurocognitive impairment. Study limitations include the limited assessment of sociocultural variables and generalizability (e.g., other Latina/o populations, age limit [19 − 60 years]). Future research is needed to: 1) investigate these norms with U.S.-dwelling Spanish-speakers of non-Mexican heritage and other clinical subpopulations; 2) expand coverage of cognitive domains (e.g. language, visuospatial); 3) develop large normative datasets for children and older Latina/o populations; 4) examine how sociocultural factors impact performance (e.g., bilingualism, acculturation); 5) investigate these norms' diagnostic and ecological validity; and 6) develop norms for neurocognitive change across time. It is hoped that the NP-NUMBRS norms will aid researchers and clinicians working with U.S.-dwelling Spanish-speakers from the U.S.-Mexico borderland to conduct research and evidence-based neuropsychological evaluations in a more culturally responsive and ethical manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper describes the methodology and sample characteristics of the Neuropsychological Norms for the U.S.-Mexico Border Region in Spanish (NP-NUMBRS) Project, which aimed to generate demographically-adjusted norms for a battery of neuropsychological tests in this population. The sample consisted of 254 healthy Spanish-speakers, ages 19-60 years, recruited from the U.S.-Mexico border regions of Arizona (n = 102) and California (n = 152). Participants completed a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery assessing multiple domains (verbal fluency, speed of information processing, attention/working memory, executive function, learning and memory, visual-spatial skills and fine motor skills). Fluency in both Spanish and English was assessed with performance-based measures. Other culturally-relevant data on educational, social, and language background were obtained via self-report. Demographic influences on test performances were modeled using fractional polynomial equations that allow consideration of linear and non-linear effects. There were no significant demographic differences between participants tested in Arizona and California. Age and gender were similar across education ranges. Two thirds of the sample were Spanish dominant and the remainder were considered bilingual. Individual articles in this Special Issue detail the generation of demographically adjusted T-scores for the various tests in the battery as well as an exploration of bilingualism effects. Norms developed through the NP-NUMBRS project stand to improve the diagnostic accuracy of neuropsychological assessment in Spanish-speaking young-to-middle-aged adults living in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Application of the present norms to other groups should be done with caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the discourse of a specific type of meme in Spanish, the image macro, is analysed, together with several ways in which memes generate humorous effects. Two main areas are addressed: (a) how humour arises from the processing of the text in the meme (decoding of the text plus further inferential enrichment); and (b) how humour relies on specific combinations of the text and the image in the meme. The pragmatic framework used in the analysis will be relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which in previous research (especially Yus 2016) has proven to be a valid foundation for the analysis of humour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A formal perspective is the focus of this paper, which aims to discuss and represent the perception of nasalization of vowel /a/ in certain nasal contexts, a phenomenon of allophony in Spanish, which can be either phonological or allophonic in Portuguese. Empirical support is based on data from 9 native speakers from Montevideo, Uruguay, and 15 Brazilian learners of Spanish as a second language. Perception data, taken from studies carried out by Brisolara and Matzenauer (2018a, 2018b), were obtained by an Identification Test, which was run by the TP software program (RAUBER et al., 2012). The fact that the Uruguayan have lower accuracy than the Brazilian to identify nasalized vowels is attributed to the strict allophonic nature of the phenomenon in Spanish. It was captured and formalized by the Bidirectional Processing and Grammar Model -- BiPhon (BOERSMA, 2006, 2007; BOERSMA; HAMANN, 2009), which integrates the Stochastic Optimality Theory. Since perception, according to BiPhon, has the role of mapping continuous phonetic representation to a discrete phonological surface structure, the phenomenon related to the perception of nasalization of the vowel /a/ in Spanish was formalized in a way that represented, through the interaction between Cue Constraints and Structural Constraints, the difference between grammars of Brazilian Spanish learners and of Uruguayans: the weight of the *VORALN and *Vnasal Structural Constraints was decisive in specifying both grammars, and the proximity of the central values of the Structural and Cue Constraints represented the presence of variation in the perception data of the Uruguayan and the Brazilian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is to analyse the state of Medical Spanish in two monolingual dictionaries (Dictionary of the Spanish Language of RAE and Dictionary of Spanish Use by María Moliner). Moreover, the entries will be compared in two other medical dictionaries which are available on-line (Diccionario médico-biológico, histórico y etimológico and the dictionary of PortalesMedicos). The object of this study are thirty definitions related to semantic field of sports massage: the focus of research will be also on studying the occurrance of the terms of corpus and whether the entries have labels and what kinds of them (of medicine, biology, physiotherapy or others). The result of the carried-out research is that definitions from corpus not always meet one of the fundamental principle of the scientific language -- to be monosemous. Using the labels in the analysed field is inconsistent and diverse. Neither physiotherapy nor medicine are the most often occurring labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses contributions of literature to foreign language teaching, in the training and performance of teachers, based on two research projects: a Master's degree, which analyzed two collections of textbooks for teaching the Spanish language; and a teaching project that focused on the performance of undergraduate students in Letters/Spanish during their trainee period at a foreign language center. The research is intersected by the perspective that the literary text can contribute significantly to the teaching of languages, since it presents linguistic, cultural, social and historical elements. The investigations were based on the literature review on the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language in Brazil and on qualitative research-act ion (LÜDKE; ANDRÉ, 2013; THIOLLENT, 2011). The conclusion was that the broad potential of literature is not yet sufficiently explored in the classroom, neither in textbooks, which maintain a superficial and utilitarian approach, a factor that corroborates the relevance of this discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a discussion of narrative podcasts based on the analysis of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish language radio show created in the United States in 2011. The research aims to demonstrate that the emergence of the narrative podcast is strongly linked to the tradition of National Public Radio (NPR), the American public radio network founded in 1970. The article presents a brief history and examples of NPR radio shows that became fundamental in the development of the podcast’s journalistic tradition. In addition, it highlights the Radio Ambulante project as one of the most representative examples of this tradition in a foreign language. In this essay, two episodes of this podcast are analyzed: “Las Hijas de Maria Señorina” and “Mais Médicos”, productions of 2018 totally or partially dedicated to Brazil that had their audio transcribed in Portuguese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency of Brazil in 2018 had repercussions worldwide. Important vehicles, such as The Economist and The New York Times, have dedicated a prime space to the political event. In this paper, however, the focus is on the coverage made by South American newspaper sites that speak Spanish language shortly after the announcement of the outcome of the election. For that, nine newspapers from different countries were selected and their texts were analyzed through Content Analysis, by Bardin (2011). Despite the variety of context-related themes, Jair Bolsonaro and the PT, the texts had more resemblance than differences in the way they dealt with the subject, showing that the south of Latin America - even without much dialogue between its peoples - follows relatively similar paths, including in journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If heritage languages are defined by their local sociolinguistic status and situation (Montrul, 2016), the case of Latin American Spanish in Switzerland was defined, at the start of this investigation as practically inexistent at the state level. Though Latin Americans in Switzerland seem to be larger in number than Spanish migrants, they face more obstacles when trying to be taken into account by heritage language development policies, especially in early childhood. The reasons are diverse, but perhaps the most important one is that they are not perceived as a group in need of special integration policies. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence of the impact a heritage language and culture development program which includes mixed groups (heritage and foreign language) had on the Swiss society's attitude towards Spanish speakers, especially (but not exclusively) Latin Americans living in the city of Wil and surrounding areas in the canton of St. Gallen. This work also presents evidence of the identity reconstruction process in migrant families. To this end, several impact indicators are defined and the creation process of the program together with the data record that took place between 2013 and 2020 are explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, several studies have shown the polyfunctionality of the particle como in Spanish. Beyond its approximating semantic value, it has been established that como also fulfils pragmaticdiscursive functions, such as retardation, mitigation and introduction of direct speech (Holmvik, 2011; Jørgensen, 2012; Panussis, 2016; Mondaca, 2017; Panussis and San Martín, 2017, Mondaca, 2019). This paper aims to analyze, on the one hand, the relationship between the approximating use of como and its function as a direct speech introducer in Chilean Spanish, in order to establish what types of information are introduced in direct style, through this particle, by the speakers. On the other hand, and from an exploratory perspective, the study pursues to identify the syntactic combinations that como, as a direct speech introducer, presents. To achieve these aims, a corpus of 24 sociolinguistic interviews collected in the Fondecyt Project 11110211 has been used. The distribution of this corpus includes six speakers from each of the four geographical macro-areas of Chile (Wagner, 1998, 2004). The main results show the following: a) The function of introduction of direct speech associated to como is linked to the approximating value of the particle; b) the direct speech introduced by como not only reproduces speech quotes, but also thoughts, hypothetical speech, stereotyped speech, and attitudes; and, c) although como can operate as an only introductory element of direct speech, most frequently it acts in combination with other elements, such as the verb ser and the adverb así. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents several rather unexpected manuscripts that have been discovered in the Firkovitch collections. These collections, which are preserved in the National Library of Russia, are best known for Hebrew, Karaite, Samaritan, and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, and have attracted the interest of specialists in Middle-Eastern languages and cultures. It is generally not known that they also contain manuscripts written in a western language. In the course of my research on the collections, however, I have come across approximately twenty manuscripts in Judeo-Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students from Mexico, ranging from elementary to university levels, regularly commute across the United States-Mexico border (physically and digitally) to attend class. These individuals are known as transfronterizos/as/istas, terms stemming from the Spanish word for "cross-border" that highlights their bicultural experiences. They are characterized by dual citizenship, frequent travel across a borderland geography, and fluid identities. The unique experience of toggling and acquiring knowledge and experiences from different countries constitutes a distinct identity and movement. Transfronterizos legally cross the border in both directions for various reasons, including for work, healthcare, to escape violence, and seek opportunities; however, the primary aim of this paper is to investigate the occurrence, rationale, and perspectives of cross-border students. What circumstances cause them to cross the border in order to go to school? How does the digital and physical commute affect learning and identity? Are teachers and administrators aware of the challenges and opportunities playing out in their classrooms, virtual and otherwise? These questions are addressed and contextualized through secondary literature and primary interviews with transfronterizos who commute across the border to attend school. The article concludes with a call for more research and policy focused on bilingual education, transparency, empathy, mobility, and an expanded spectrum of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Spanish-speaking and Italian-speaking linguistic panorama, the subjunctive has been defined mainly from a structural perspective based on the notion of syntactic dependency. From the 19th century became relevant the semantic approach, and the notions of reality / unreality began to predominate in the definition of mode. However, many bibliographic sources such as Vásquez (2013), Stewart (2002) and Haverkate (2002), have revealed that the use of the subjunctive is not only limited to the appearance of a modalizer of possibility, imaginary, or potential fact, but that the intention of the speaker and the presence of inducers without any unreality value can introduce inexplicable forms of the subjunctive from a perspective purely semantic or clearly syntactic. The objective of this paper is to identify the main distributions of the subjunctive in Spanish and Italian. Contrastive, exploratory, descriptive, and documentary analysis is limited to epistemic and deontic completive propositions, relative sentences and adverbial subordinate clauses, given space limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presenting and classifying some fixed phraseological units found in García Márquez's novels is the purpose of this paper. The proposed methodology includes detailed reading, analysis and collection of the phraseological corpus in some of the author's novels, as well as the comparison of said corpus with monolingual and phraseological dictionaries of general Spanish, and dictionaries of Colombianisms, to determine semantic and pragmatic factors of these units. As a result, a list of phraseologisms present in the work of the Colombian writer was prepared, allowing observe that García Márquez's novels are a valuable source of phraseological expressions. It is concluded that literary work, taken as a linguistic corpus, offers possibilities to study the expressive resources of the language in use; hence the relevance of this analysis, since phraseology studies in the literature are a fruitful field of research that require further exploration in Colombian works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show in detail a teaching approach to change the way of teaching (to teach) Spanish (or any other first language) at university. To do this, the idea that this change must be created at the beginning of the educational system -that is, the teacher training- is taken as a basis. Hence, a teaching experience carried out with teachers-to-be in the subject "Spanish Language Teaching" is presented. This experience applies the cases study to learn (to teach) Spanish and includes several active methodologies, such as cooperative learning and the task-based approach. The results, focused both on the vision of the subject as a whole and on the specific activity that concerns us, suggest a general acceptance of the methodologies used. Nevertheless, the main conclusion also contains a series of paradoxes that affect especially those who do not feel comfortable learning with the above mentioned case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes aspects of a little-known work in the context of grammar and history of Spanish language teaching in Portugal, the Gramática espanhola para uso dos portugueses (Oporto, 1947) by Julio Martínez Almoyna: the possible reasons for its publication in Portugal in the mid-twentieth century, the structure of the lessons and its didactic characteristics. Regarding the first aspect, the writing of the work is framed in the Luso-Spanish socio-political context of the time. Regarding specifically methodological issues, we analyze in detail the microstructure of the lessons and the underlying didactic criteria. In order to examine the didactic characteristics of the manual, we put it in contrast with other works published in Portugal for the teaching of Spanish; specifically, the Gramática elemental de la lengua española (Lisbon, 1947), by Pablo Gayán Hernanz, and Español para lusitanos. Método práctico de lengua española (Coimbra, 1952), by José María Viqueira Barreiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative bibliometric analysis between English and Spanish languages over patents and research about expandable polystyrene (known in Mexico as "unicel") and its current state in health and environmental aspects in order to learn about the subject depending on the used language. It was found that the number of patents registered in Spanish only reaches 39% of the total of those that exist in English, while the number of investigations written in Spanish only represents 13% of the total in English. The current uses of polystyrene are among the most predominant topics in Spanish, however new developments are scarce, while in English, research over new products applied in all industries predominate. On environmental and health issues, in Spanish there is only 2% of the existing research in English, while, on health issues, there is only 7%. Therefore, Spanish-speaking researchers requiring updated and highly specialized information on expandable polystyrene and its implications will only be able to access about 10% of all the available information on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the software development industry presents challenges for processing business information, specifically that contained in textual documents. In the process of software requirements elicitation, a potential source of relevant information is business documents, since they can facilitate the knowledge understanding about a domain, as well as know the evolution of a product. Despite its usefulness, requirements engineers do not always use it for their work because of time and costs involved. In this paper this problem is addressed and it is recognized through a systematic literature review, the potentiality of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract relevant textual information from business documents, and the utility of its representation in conceptual models. Starting from this, a semiautomatic method of extracting information from business documents written in natural language in Spanish and its representation in a conceptual model is proposed. The method is supported in a reference methodological framework for Text Analytics projects, is based on NLP techniques, and the output is represented in a class diagram. The method was evaluated through a case study with software analysts in Medellin-Colombia, taking as input telecommunications resolution documents. The evaluation allows us to conclude that the model is a satisfactory approach to solving the problem, and some lines of work are identified to generalize a solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Necrotourism is a little-studied area from tourismology, linguistics, terminology and translatology. In fact, tourists' lack of knowledge about this type of tourism is reflected in a limited number of researches, often very locally conducted. It has also led to a lack of data or surveys at national or regional level. This paper aims to complement the studies already undertaken in tourismology, carrying out a discursive analysis of the necrotourist texts in French and Spanish. Therefore, a textual corpus in both languages, composed of tourist guides, brochures and websites will be compiled. In this way, we will study the lexical-semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic-cultural characteristics of these texts, in order to facilitate their translation. This preliminary research concludes that there is not a necrotourist discourse as such, but a particular tourist discourse, characterized by a great interdisciplinarity and by the numerous semantic fields that nourish its lexicon, such as architecture and history of art. It has been also observed that this discourse is very influenced by culture, since each society has a particular relationship with death and places of burial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museum texts play a critical role in the discourse that accompanies any given artifact, exhibition or museum. In the case of museum text translation, some relevant contributions have appeared in recent years; however, some scholars suggest that this is a field of study that still needs to be further developed. This paper focuses on several aspects of museum text translation based on a descriptive analysis of records found on websites from 26 museums in New York City. By analyzing the corpus, which has been essentially compiled in two periods (2016 and 2020), we notice a word increase of 40% within this four-year period. As for the types of texts that are more frequent in the corpus, educational resources are at the top of the list, followed by press releases and texts informing about parallel activities. There is also a tendency for translating texts related to temporary exhibitions, as compared to texts on the museums' collections, which are scarce in the corpus. Lastly, in the light of the generalized museum closure in mid-March 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it is noticed that just a few of the museums' websites inform visitors of the closure by using the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to highlight the phenomenon of death in Spanish and Serbian traditions and cultures by comparing metaphors on death and dying. The author aims to identify metaphorical mappings in these two languages, as well as to detect the ways of metaphorical conceptualization of the phenomenon of death. We proceeded from the assumption that a common Christian tradition (Orthodox in Serbian and Catholic in Spanish case) had influenced the way of Serbian and Spanish conceptualization of death. The same or similar religious traditions could reveal certain similarities in the contrastive analysis of the metaphors on death and dying. The paper relies on the postulates of cognitive linguistics and the theory of conceptual metaphor. A metaphor represents the main mechanism in cognitive linguistics which allows us to understand abstract concepts and phenomenons we cannot see or touch. When the topic of death is concerned, it finds its place in cognitive linguistics because death is one of the biggest concerns of peope, seen as the biggest mystery of all, although, at the same time, we do not want to think too much about it. The analysis suggests that metaphorical mapping for death are based on the Christian religious belief system (beliefs about immortality, eternal life, existence of Paradise and Hell, Judgment Day, God as the Creator...). These beliefs provide the basis for a series of metaphorical expressions that are common in both languages and cultures. These beliefs are form the basis of the metaphors: DEATH IS THE ETERNAL LIFE, DEATH IS A UNION / A MEETING WITH GOD, DEATH IS A DREAM / A REST', DEATH IS A TRAVEL / A DEPARTURE AND DEATH IS THE END. These results do not surprise us bearing in mind that both nations belong to the European context and Christian traditions and cultures, nevertheless the question of the existence of the universal character of metaphorical mapping, that we found in both languages, still remains. The guidelines for some future research on this subject could be contrastive studies that would compare these languages with other languages that do not belong to the Jewish-Christian tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a compositional interpretation of Spanish simple conditional morphology (cantaría 'would sing') in independent sentences set within the semantic situations framework. It proposes that Spanish simple conditional morphology is composed of (a) a past component that encodes a topic situation, (b) a universal future operator with either an epistemic flavor or a temporal (i.e. historical) flavor/accessibility, and (c) a universal imperfective operator with a variety of flavors. Based on the interactions of these three components, the paper develops derivations for (1) past-oriented inferential readings that distinguish Spanish from French and Italian, (2) future-oriented conditionals involving past plans, which are apparently shared with French and Italian, and (3) future-in-the-past conditionals, where Spanish appears to resemble French and differs from Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives/purpose/research question: This paper’s objective is to offer new insights into the effects of language on memory for causation events in a second language (L2) context. The research was driven by the question of whether proficient L2 users acquired L2 thinking-for-speaking-and-remembering strategies along with the relevant expressions for different types of causation (intentional versus non-intentional). Design/methodology/approach: The cognitive domain of causation is an ideal platform for this investigation, since the lexicalisation of causation differs clearly in the two languages under consideration, English and Spanish. Spanish speakers always distinguish between intentional and non-intentional events through the use of different constructions. The English pattern of lexicalisation in this domain often leaves intentionality unspecified. Our methodology involves an experimental elicitation of event verbalisations and recall memory responses to video stimuli by English and Spanish monolinguals and bilinguals. Data and analysis: The analysis has shown that the Spanish monolinguals and first language (L1) Spanish/L2 English speakers always distinguished between intentional and non-intentional events, while the English monolinguals and L1 English/L2 Spanish speakers generally used expressions that were underspecified with regard to intentionality. Findings/conclusions: All populations used their habitual language patterns as an aid to memory. Spanish monolingual had better recall than their English peers. L2 speakers were mainly relying on the L1 in spite of speaking only the L2 during the experiment. Originality: Possible effects of these typological differences between an L1 and an L2 on speaker recall memory have not been investigated before. Significance/implications: The research presented in this paper informs the theoretical assumptions related to the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis by showing empirically that late bilinguals adhere to their L1 patterns as an aid to memory while speaking in their L2. This novel finding contributes to an improved understanding of language processing and language use among late bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to conduct a review of research on the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model-based programme within physical education. Papers selected for analysis were found through searches of Web of Science, SportDiscus (EBSCO), SCOPUS, and ERIC (ProQuest) databases. The keywords ‘responsibility model’ and ‘physical education’ were used in different combinations. The relevant articles were checked for the following criteria: (a) the study has been published in a peer-reviewed international journal; (b) it included Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model-based programme implementation; (c) programmes were implemented within physical education classes; and (d) the full text was available in English or Spanish. The quality of the selected studies was scored using a quality assessment list. Twenty-two papers that satisfied the selection criteria were identified. A practical analysis of these papers to present the results placed them into three categories: (a) impact of the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model-based programme on teachers; (b) programme implementation features; and (c) outcomes of the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility-based programme on student participants. Longer studies with follow-up data, quantitative methodological designs, and larger samples would be particularly important for future investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Many early Spanish-English bilingual speakers in the USA learn Spanish as their first language at home and English in school. This paper seeks to elucidate whether these speakers develop a separate phonological system for English and, if so, the role of primary and secondary cues in the development of the second language (L2) system. Design/methodology/approach: The phonetic realization of the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ is analyzed among three groups: early Spanish-English bilinguals; L1 English speakers who are late learners of Spanish; and L1 Spanish speakers who are late learners of English. The participants (N = 15) engaged in a reading task and a conversation task in each language during a single recording session. Data and analysis: 1578 tokens of /p/, /t/, /k/ were extracted and analyzed using acoustic software. Voice onset time in milliseconds and center of gravity in Hertz were analyzed, and monofactorial and multifactorial analyses were performed to determine the role of linguistic background. Findings/conclusions: Evidence is found of two phonological systems among early bilingual speakers, with varying degrees of assimilation to the phonological systems of the native speakers of each language. Originality: We argue that early bilinguals construct their L2 system of /p/, /t/, /k/ in English based on the primary cue of voice onset time rather than the secondary cue of center of gravity, as they are accustomed to noticing differences in voice onset time in Spanish and because the center of gravity of /p/, /t/, /k/ in English is more variable than voice onset time, and therefore represents a more variable and less predictable cue for early bilinguals as they construct their L2 system. Significance/implications: This paper contributes to the literature on the construction of phonological systems and to research detailing the speech of early Spanish-English bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the properties and distribution of the forms ser and estar when combined with adjectival complements in copular sentences in Iberoromance languages. The paper sets a detailed data paradigm that brings into light several differences between Western Iberian Romance languages (Galician, Portuguese, Castilian) and Eastern ones (like Catalan). The explanation relies on the hypothesis developed in Gumiel-Molina, Moreno-Quibén and Pérez-Jiménez 2015a to account for the properties of the «copula + adjective» structure in Spanish. The specificities shown by Catalan can be explained if one auxiliary hypothesis is assumed: a process of linguistic change is taking place in Catalan so that two estar forms coexist synchronically. Moreover, it will be proposed that the form estar in Western Iberian languages underwent a grammaticalization process that accounts for the fact that the so-called «evidential use of estar» is fully extended in these languages, but not in Catalan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the linguistic features of Afro-Peruvian Spanish as spoken in the municipality of El Carmen, in the immediate vicinity of Chincha. These are linguistic variants that can mostly be found in other parts of Peru, being always stigmatized as 'peasant', 'vulgar', etc. Some features, however, are rather unusual within their national context and may even be related to Caribbean Spanish or to other afrovernacular varieties spoken in Latin America. Against this background, some comments about the place of Afro-Peruvian Spanish in the Peruvian variational context and in the so-called Afro-Hispanic Linguistics turn out to be mandatory. Finally, this paper highlights the actual need of an accurate variational description of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, even more as the Afro-Peruvian community is demanding and, fortunately, gaining visibility in today's Peru (although much work remains to be done). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to prove that the German preposition is a grammatical category that, from a structural-functional perspective and also from a discursive one, is nothing to sniff at. This is so due to the treatment it has received for the last 80 years or so by traditional grammar. It has been undervalued by considering it a tiny item (Hoffmann, 2010: 52) with an aspect of minor category (Bednarský, 2002: 85) and atony (Alcina & Blecua, 1991: 496). In line with this we believe that its importance should be nuanced for the progress of the discipline. So this paper will focus on defining and systematizing prepositional constructions from a syntactic, pragmatic-discoursive perspective. This should be useful to Spanish speakers to better understand the functioning of the German language in this aspect. To fully configure its sense, our emphasis will be in the selective relations steered by the verb valency and the speaker's intention alluding to the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a review of the many dictionaries of psychology published in Latin America between 1916 and 2000. Information was retrieved from publishing house catalogs, databases, archives and libraries, and academic curricula, as well as through consultations with specialists in the history of psychology. The article mainly highlights those works that have become widely disseminated in the region. Within this framework, it foregrounds works produced by local authors, as well as foreign works translated into Spanish and Portuguese. The paper also makes reference to various thematic dictionaries, such as those of social psychology and psychoanalysis. Overall, it is argued that the widest dissemination of dictionaries in Latin America took place after the mid-twentieth century, when universities introduced psychology majors and an audience of psychology specialists had emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss some useful concepts to explain the opposing and complementary relationship between languages that share a specific geosociocultural context. This dynamic relationship is known as linguistic and social interactions. This paper discuss the dynamic processes arising between the mapuzugun and Spanish language, and it also explores some sociolinguistic descriptions about the Mapuche language which are mostly narrow and focus on the asymmetric relationship between languages and the results of these relationships. In this context we propose a new in situ revision of the linguistic interaction to generate territorial diagnostics that consider interactive processes, dynamic and historical, dialectical and identitary concerns that both Spanish and Mapuzugun have in the communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coda-final consonant deletion has been extensively documented in Eastern Andalusian Spanish; however, its effects on neighbouring segments is still unknown. Scholars working on consonant deletion in Eastern Andalusian Spanish have mainly focused on /s/, given the semantic importance of this consonant in Spanish. As a result, other consonants which are often deleted syllable-finally in this geolect have been studied to a much lesser degree. The present paper aims to expand the traditional view on vowel doubling by analysing /-s/, /-r/, and /-Ɵ/ deletion before /a/. Firstly, the speech of 24 speakers from El Ejido (Eastern Andalusia) is analysed to ascertain how the deletion of word final /s/, /r/, and /Ɵ/ changes the quality of a preceding /a/. Secondly, a perception test is carried out with native speakers from the local area to confirm whether these speakers can differentiate perceptually between word-final /a/ and /a/ preceding underlying /-s/, /-r/, or /-Ɵ/. This paper presents two main conclusions: 1) /-s/, /-r/, and /-Ɵ/ deletion changes the quality of a preceding /a/ to different degrees; 2) EAS speakers can identify whether /a/ is followed or not by an underlying /-s/, /-r/, or /-Ɵ/, but they cannot identify which consonant has been deleted in each case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the historical evolution of the causative and inchoative periphrases with poner in Spanish. In these constructions, poner functions as an auxiliary verb, combining with a subordinate infinitive to which it adds a causative (poner a alguien a trabajar) or an inchoative aspectual meaning (ponerse a trabajar). The aim of this paper is twofold. It aims (i) to determine when and how both periphrases developed out of the basic locative construction of poner, and (ii) to shed light on their degree of grammaticalization. Therefore, this article exposes the results of a formal and semantic analysis of the causative and inchoative periphrases with poner between the thirteenth and twenty-first century. It is shown that both constructions developed in a parallel way, but at a different pace. The inchoative periphrasis seems to be more grammaticalized than the causative periphrasis, presenting a much higher frequency of use and a higher degree of syntactic incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work introduces a subset of informational features (termed core intentional features ), different from standard pragmatic features such as topic and focus. Adopting the basic tenets of the Minimalist program, core intentional features are defined as edge features which sit in the relevant phases and are subject to parametric variation. They are assumed to drive the derivation of the sentence so that it constitutes an intentionally-adequate object (i.e. a categorical or a thetic statement) even in the absence of a particular communicative situation. The paper specifically focuses on one of these features, [DI] ( discourse intention ), and on how it determines the eventual position of the subject in a discourse-prominent language such as Spanish. A preliminary distinction is made between sentences that inaugurate the discourse (d-sentences) and sentences which are integrated in a particular context (context-dependent sentences). It is argued that the SV/VS order in Spanish follows from the conditions of valuation of [DI] in each case; in particular, valuation of [DI] in d-sentences will be a matter of structural and semantic prominence whereas in context-dependent sentences it will depend on pragmatic conditions. The paper also addresses a number of significant contrasts in the much-debated issue of the placement of the subject in Spanish, which receive a principled explanation under the theory of core intentional features proposed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an eye tracking study on the reading process of high school students while answering questions from the Enem-2017 Spanish Language Test. The research was aimed at identifying reading strategies and sources of difficulty of two groups of participants when taking the test. Group A (GA) had more previous study time in the Spanish Language and group B (GB) had less previous study time. The analyses considered eye movements (monitored during the task), accuracy and time of performance. Eye tracking data demonstrated that in both groups the preferred reading path is from the text to the multiple-choice alternatives and that textual complexity seems to affect the number and duration of fixations. There was a significant difference between the two groups, with more hits for GA than for GB. Therefore, the time devoted to studying the language seems to affect the performance of the participants in the reading comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the acoustic properties of Spanish stressed mid vowels from a corpus of over 2,800 tokens produced by Galician-dominant bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. Following principles of bilingual speech production theory, we explore whether these vowels present lexically conditioned open variants [ɛ] and [ɔ] not present in monolingual Spanish. In combination with linguistic factors, we also examine whether bilingual mid-vowel production in our corpus is related to social variables. Assuming a linguistic repertoires perspective that links variation to identity performance, we argue that Spanish /e/ and /o/ are sociolinguistic variables in Galicia and that the distribution of their variants can be exploited to perform social meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines disjunctive and copulative initial coordination in Spanish (o1... o2 'either... or' and ni1... ni2 'neither... nor') with a view to demonstrating that, in contrast to conventional analyses, the former element does not pass the proofs of the coordinating conjunctions. To do so, we will base our proposal on the grammatical patterns observed in a compilation of examples from the "Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI" (in particular, from written texts in European Spanish). These patterns allow us to suggest that o1 and ni1 are not coordinators, but focal particles whose scope or dominion is the first conjunct coordinated by o2 or ni2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first "Prosodic Map of Chile", a long-term project aimed at documenting and describing (both phonetically and phonologically) the suprasegmental features of Chilean Spanish. In order to better appreciate the map's reach, a review of currently implemented similar prosodic maps is provided, including AMPER, ATLES and some others. This review considers what particular parameters are studied in each map, closely inspecting what are the foundations, directions and the overall reach of each one of them. The closing section provides a consideration of some freely available software tools designed to build maps, particularly OpenStreetMap, focusing on its potential for future international collaborative efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse Spanish verbal constructions that accept both the clitic se and the prefix auto- in order to determine whether these formations are or are not more agentive than the corresponding non-prefixed constructions (autocriticarse vs. criticarse). The proposal arises from the discussion about the different semantic values observed in formations with auto- and explores the distinctive features of such formations in contrast to those without auto-. We carried out a twofold analysis: first, we applied a set of tests of agentivity and control to a sample of 130 verbs with auto- extracted from the Modern Spanish Reference Corpus (CREA) and compared the sample with its non-prefixed pronominal pairs (i.e. verbs with clitic se). Second, we carried out a series of surveys using similar tests with Spanish speakers to guarantee the acceptability of the corpus interpretations. We argue that prefixed constructions show a higher degree of agentivity and control by external arguments, which results in the impossibility of bidirectionally replacing these constructions with those that only have the clitic se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes our proposal for Sentiment Analysis in Twitter for the Spanish language. The main characteristics of the system are the use of word embedding specifically trained from tweets in Spanish and the use of self-attention mechanisms that allow to consider sequences without using convolutional nor recurrent layers. These self-attention mechanisms are based on the encoders of the Transformer model. The results obtained on the Task 1 of the TASS 2019 workshop, for all the Spanish variants proposed, support the correctness and adequacy of our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since a drug name goes through different communication means and circumstances when it is prescribed, written, advertised, listened to, searched and administered; it tends to be confused with similar drug names that Look-Alike and Sound-Alike (LASA). LASA drug names have caused costs and damage to health. For this problem, the institutions of the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States have implemented programs for several decades to report lists of confusing drug names pairs. Thanks to these kinds of list, it has been possible to propose new models to identify confusing drug names in English and are used to reject new drug name proposals or to alert when a confusing drug name is being dispensed. However, countries such as Spain also have published a list with the Spanish LASA drug names, and it is not clear enough whether the models previously proposed for the drug names in English are useful for the list in Spanish or if it is necessary to adjust and update them for the Spanish language. This paper focuses on updating and improving the identification of LASA drug names in Spanish. First, we update the state-of-the-art by evaluating all the individual similarity measures proposed previously and all the models that combine these measures with the list in Spanish. Second, we updated the models with new individual measures and then adjusted them with the list in Spanish to improve the identification of LASA drug names in Spanish. After that, 25 individual similarity measures and 8 models to identify confused drug names in Spanish are compared to obtain the best result and conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents an experimental study on the task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for a narrow domain in Spanish language. This study considers two approaches commonly used in this kind of problem, namely, a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). For the latter, we employed a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with ELMO's pre-trained word embeddings for Spanish. The comparison between the probabilistic model and the deep learning model was carried out in two collections, the Spanish dataset from CoNLL-2002 considering four classes under the IOB tagging schema, and a Mexican Spanish news dataset with seventeen classes under IOBES schema. The paper presents an analysis about the scalability, robustness, and common errors of both models. This analysis indicates in general that the BiLSTM-ELMo model is more suitable than the CRF model when there is "enough" training data, and also that it is more scalable, as its performance was not significantly affected in the incremental experiments (by adding one class at a time). On the other hand, results indicate that the CRF model is more adequate for scenarios having small training datasets and many classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal information is crucial in knowledge extraction. Being able to locate events in a timeline is necessary to understand the narrative behind every text. To this aim, several temporal taggers have been proposed in literature –nevertheless, not all languages received the same attention. Most taggers work only for English texts, and not many have been developed for other languages. Also the scarcity of annotated corpora in other languages notably hinders the task. In this paper we present a new rule-based tagger called Annotador (Añotador in Spanish) able to process texts both in Spanish and English. Furthermore, a new corpus with more than 300 short texts containing common temporal expressions, called the HourGlass corpus, has been built in order to test it and to facilitate the development of new resources and tools. Professionals from different domains intervened in the gathering of the text, making it heterogeneous and easy to use thanks to the tags added to each entry. Finally, we analyzed main challenges in the time expression extraction task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]