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The aim of this paper is to analyze the information about the paraverbal communication provided by Spanish manuals of forensic eloquence published in the 19th century. Specifically, the works analyzed are: Sainz de Andino (1847[1828]), Enciso Castrillón (1840), Corradi (1843), Saurí y Lleopart (1847), Pérez de Anaya (1848), López (2013[1849]) and León y Olarrieta (1862). In conclusion, the first published manual is the one that contains more information on paraverbal communication, followed by Enciso Castrillón (1840) and Corradi (1843). In the same way, it should be emphasized that in many of the works studied the pauses have a prominent role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we attempt to examine the way the dictionary, as a discursive instrument, historical and ideological (Lauria, 2010,2011) has intervened in the construction of the sense of the discursive object inmigrante. Thus, this work consists in reveal and analyse diachronically the different lexicographic meanings that the entry inmigrante, the semantically close lexemes (eniigrante, migrante, etc.) and the linked verbs (emigrar, inmigrar, migrar) had in the Spanish language dictionaries edited in Spain and Argentina between 1726 and 1910. We will consider, firstly, the way in which the production conditions, either immediately or broadly speaking (Orlandi, 2015), have largely determined the historical changes that the semantic field of immigration experienced in the Spanish lexicography during the XIX century. Secondly, we will reflect on the way that the local production has re-signified the immigrant at the beginning of the XX century, key historic moment when the "mass immigration" phenomenon and the commemoration of the Centenary of the Revolution of May come together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines patterns of phonetic accommodation as a function of addressee target language proficiency. Specifically, it analyzes short-term adjustments in the articulation of coda consonants /s/, /ɾ/, and /n/ in the speech of eight New York Dominican Spanish speakers during a series of conversations with different addressees – a native speaker and three nonnative Spanish speakers who have varying levels of Spanish proficiency. Results demonstrate that addressee native-speaker status and proficiency play a statistically significant role in both the degree and direction of phonetic accommodation exhibited by the native speaker informants. While the informants converge with both the most- and least-proficient addressees, they initially diverge from the mid-proficient addressee. The study finds that the native speaker informants use overtly-prestigious variants to attune to the academic Spanish of the most-proficient addressees and use covertly-prestigious, emblematic variants with both the mid-proficient and native speaker addressees to demonstrate outgroup and ingroup membership, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beliefs of a teacher about language, culture, teaching-learning process, among other aspects, may reflect on their actions, methodologies, teaching strategies and their students' learning. In this context, considering that the Spanish language is official language in more than 21 countries and each of them has particularities and richness of linguistic variations and cultural traditions, this work proposal seeks to investigate the beliefs of Spanish teachers of the State of Ceará about diversity language and the perspectives for their teaching. For this, the paper bases on studies on beliefs situated in the area of Applied Linguistics and Educational Sociolinguistics. In addition, to obtain the data, we applied questionnaires with Spanish teachers of the state public network and / or language schools. As a result, we found that most of the 27 teachers investigated chose to speak a peninsular variety; however, they are not favorable to the valorization of this variety in the didactic approach of the diversity of the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

this paper analyzes the significance of the expression "argentino neutro" [neutral Argentinian], used from 2009 to 2015 in official documents on the education portal Educ.ar and on the Ministry of Education's various TV channels ("Encuentro," "Pakapaka" and "DeporTV"). By examining style manuals in detail from Encuentro and Pakapaka, corresponding to the years 2012-2015, we will attempt to show that these documents construct a linguistic model alternate to the various attempts at Spanish language unification, in particular "Panhispanism" or so-called "neutral Spanish." Moreover, this alternative linguistic model was consistently reflected in the Ministry of Education's television programming, which exhibited a much more diverse linguistic representation in Argentinian media than usual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper introduces the melodic characterisation of spontaneous Spanish presented by speakers from two regions in the north of Spain: Asturias and Navarre, based on a conversational corpus composed of 100 utterances emitted by 62 participants. It focuses on the intonation of the dialects, an aspect which is poorly investigated but highly relevant for characterising and distinguishing one from the other. The study is based on the Melodic Analysis of Speech method, a meticulous acoustic analysis through which exact values are obtained from spontaneous speech, which can then be compared. In short, the most notable coincident and divergent melodic features between the two dialects are: (1) the tendency of the two to present a first peak, more frequently tonic in Asturian Spanish and atonic in Navarrese; (2) an almost flat or slightly falling body of the contour with abundant internal inflections, which are also distinguished by the syllable where the rise ends: tonic in Asturian Spanish, and tonic and atonic in the final position of the word in Navarrese; and (3) more pronounced final inflections, with five different endings, and tonal fields, in the region of Navarre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A Holographic mobile-based application is used to practice the pronunciation of basic English vocabulary words. • A funny 3D holographic robot interacts as virtual teacher in charge of practicing. • An experiment with 70 Spanish pre-school children has been carried out. • Results shown a significant impact on the children's motivation and performance. Abstract This paper describes a holographic mobile-based application designed to help Spanish-speaking children to practice the pronunciation of basic English vocabulary words. The mastery of vocabulary is a fundamental step when learning a language but is often perceived as boring. Producing the correct pronunciation is frequently regarded as the most difficult and complex skill for new learners of English. In order to address these problems this research takes advantage of the power of multi-channel stimuli (sound, image and interaction) in a mobile-based hologram application in order to motivate students and improve their experience of practicing. We adapted the prize-winning HolograFX game and developed a new mobile application to help practice English pronunciation. A 3D holographic robot that acts as a virtual teacher interacts via voice with the children. To test the tool we carried out an experiment with 70 Spanish pre-school children divided into three classes, the control group using traditional methods such as images in books and on the blackboard, and two experimental groups using our drills and practice software. One experimental group used the mobile application without the holographic game and the other experimental group used the application with the holographic game. We performed pre-test and post-test performance assessments, a satisfaction survey and emotion analysis. The results are very promising. They show that the use of the holographic mobile-based application had a significant impact on the children's motivation. It also improved their performance compared to traditional methods used in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Emoji are a set of pictographs available on several electronic platforms and applications, which are gradually replacing emoticons (sequences of punctuation marks representing facial expressions). Over the last decade, researchers have proposed that emoticons not only convey emotional content in computer-mediated communication, but they may also perform pragmatic functions, such as signaling the illocutionary force of the utterance (Dresner and Herring, 2010), mitigating threatening formulations (Wilson, 1993), or strengthening expressive speech acts (Skovholt et al., 2014). Despite their growing popularity, little pragmatic research to date specifically addresses emoji. The present paper bridges this gap by exploring the functions of emoji in a corpus of WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2005) rapport management framework, the analysis shows that emoji are used across different domains in the corpus: they not only upgrade or downgrade different speech acts (illocutionary domain), as pointed out by previous research, but they also contribute to achieving a successful interaction by signaling closing sections or by helping to negotiate openings (discourse domain), as well as serving as a way to frame playful interactions (stylistic domain). This study also shows that some practices related to the use of emoji may be influenced by Spanish culture. Highlights • Analysis of some of the functions of emoji in WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. • Emoji upgrade or downgrade different speech acts. • Emoji help to manage the conversation, e.g. in openings and closings. • Emoji are also a stylistic choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research questions: German and Spanish differ in lexicalization of object position in placement events (e.g. They stand/lay-put the binoculars on the shelf). Do native (L1) speakers of these languages show different recognition memory for object position in placement scenes ("Thinking for Speaking" (TFS))? And if so, can learning German as a second language (L2) improve memory accuracy? Originality: There is very little research on the effect of language on memory in L2 speakers and no such studies have focused on placement events. By adopting a short time course (750 ms) between the prime and recognition phase this study makes a methodological advancement. Design/Methodology/Approach: We employed a design with L1 speakers (N = 54) of German and Spanish, and a group of Spanish L2 learners (N = 123) of German. Participants were presented with a two-phased memory task with minimum delay, with language and pictures showing placement events. Following the direction indicated by German placement verbs we changed position of objects in the picture recognition phase. L2 German speakers received a form-focused instruction on German placement verbs (stand/lay) before the memory task. Data and Analysis: We analysed recognition accuracy for object position changes. Findings/Conclusions: Results showed that L1 German speakers had more accurate recognition memory for object position changes than L1 Spanish speakers. When Spanish learners of L2 German performed the experiment in German, their accuracy exceeded L1 German speakers' scores. Significance/Implications: The findings provide support for TFS effects on memory for object position in placement events for L1 speakers and show accuracy advantages for L2 speakers. Future studies should consider employing tasks with short time courses as the one used in this paper, in order to establish a base of controlled and reliable findings to unravel the linguistic relativity literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Se ve (que) 's 7 values include physical and cognitive perception and evidentiality. • In a large study of spoken Spanish corpora, its most frequent value was evidential. • Behavioral Profiles show affinities of form-function combinations with evidentiality. • Those with most affinity were indirect physical perception and cognitive perception. • Constructionalization of se ve (que) generates a fully abstract sense: evidentiality. Abstract The Spanish sequence se ve (que) presents intricate functional polysemy, including constructionalization as an evidential. The present paper investigates its different formal-functional combinations and degrees of specialization as an evidential construction. The following questions were addressed: (1) How many different senses can be distinguished in the sequence se ve (que) and what are their respective frequencies? (2) How do these senses correlate with the morphosyntactic behavior of the sequence se ve (que)? (3) Which senses of se ve (que) are more closely related to each other, and how does the evidential construction relate to this polysemous network? The semantic and formal affinities of se ve (que) were studied through the Behavioral Profiles method developed by Gries and Divjak (2009), which provides an empirical, systematic and verifiable approach to studying lexical phenomena. Its application to a pragmatic phenomenon is a new departure. The results show seven senses of se ve (que), ranging from the lexical value of direct physical perception to the more abstract and evidential value of 'source of information'. According to the corpus analysis, the closest senses to the evidential pole are indirect physical perception and cognitive perception. These all introduce an inflected verb clause, possess propositional scope and are morphosyntactically frozen.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the display of dom in Catalan and focusing on the Balearic variety, this paper explores this phenomenon arguing for a discourse-driven marking, showing that the assumption that semantic hierarchies as crucial triggers for dom cannot be assumed anymore. We aim to present some ideas to address the correlation between prepositional markings and peripheral positions and to provide arguments for a syntax-pragmatics approach to dom in Clitic Dislocation. Our data shed light on the link between information structure – in particular, anaphoricity- and marked objects. This analysis would also account for other markers (i.e. de) available as a mechanism for signalling the same [+anaphoric] feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that there is nothing "differential" in the licensing conditions of Differential Object Marking and outlines an analysis that unifies dom with dative object marking and with a broader set of "derived object"-marking configurations. We show that neither morphological nor syntactic distinctiveness can be the driving force for dom: accounts of dom as a morphological distinctiveness device are inadequate diachronically and very unefficient functionally. Syntactic analyses that postulate DP-internal differences or construction-specific double-licensing conditions fail to capture the basic fact that dom is a relation between the objects and the predicates selecting them. Precisely, the burden of our unified explanation falls on the checking requirements imposed to the DP complements by the structural heads selecting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role of voice quality variation in the system of a contact language, Afro-Yungueño Spanish, a restructured variety of Spanish spoken in the Bolivian Yungas valleys. Based on case studies of naturally occurring conversation between multiple speakers, we show that certain non-modal phonation types, in this case falsetto and breathy voice, are used to index expressiveness, intensification, or emphasis. We argue that these practices have discursive meaning that could otherwise also be encoded by means of grammatical and lexical resources, and that they are an integral part of the linguistic system of this variety. We claim that these practices may have resulted from the specific socio-historical context in which this variety evolved. This suggests that voice quality and ecological factors should not be underestimated in order to reach a more complete picture of how meaning is conveyed in apparently simplified contact languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syllable-final consonant deletion has been widely documented in Eastern Andalusian Spanish, although the effects of consonant deletion on preceding vowels are still unknown. Studies analyzing syllable-final consonants in Eastern Andalusian Spanish have focused on /-s/, disregarding other consonants which are also deleted in this position. The present paper aims to extend this traditional focus by analyzing how /-s/, /-r/ and /-θ/ deletion affects preceding /i/. After analyzing 383 samples of /i/ word-finally and before underlying word-final /s/, /r/ and /θ/ in Western Almería (Eastern Andalusia), it is confirmed that the deletion of these three consonants changes the quality of preceding /i/. Furthermore, the results of a perception test confirm that speakers of Eastern Andalusian Spanish can identify whether or not /i/ is followed by an underlying /-s/, /-r/ or /-θ/ and they can also identify two types of /i/ in isolation: word-final /i/ and /i/ preceding underlying /-r/; this identification occurs at a rate which is statistically significant. It is hypothesized that, apart from vowel height and frontness, a suprasegmental feature could be the perceptual cue used to identify an underlying consonant after a vowel in this variety of Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Bilinguals with or without early Galician experience merge Galician mid vowels. • Galician and Spanish mid vowel contrasts occupy the same acoustic space. • Production of Galician and Spanish mid vowels is unaffected by code-switching. Abstract This paper examines the vowel productions of three groups of adult Galician-Spanish bilinguals: Spanish-dominant (SD) bilinguals, Galician-dominant (GD) bilinguals, and Dual Switch (DS) bilinguals who had early experience with Galician in the home, predominantly used Spanish upon school entry, but in adolescence/adulthood switched to Galician for ideological reasons. To examine how linguistic experience with Galician and Spanish affected the participants' speech, a cued picture-naming task, conducted in unilingual and code switched conditions, was used to elicit the Galician mid vowel contrasts /e-ɛ/ and /o-ɔ/ and the Spanish mid vowels /e/ and /o/. The results revealed no difference in either condition in normalised F1 and F2 across the front and back vowels in the two languages. These patterns not only held for the SD bilinguals, for whom vowel mergers were expected, but also the DS and GD bilinguals. As such, the study is the first to document widespread mergers of Galician mid-vowels in bilinguals with extensive early Galician language experience and regular use, and to demonstrate overlap with Spanish mid-vowel categories. The findings suggest that psycholinguistic factors, such as age of acquisition or language use, can only partially explain the data and that input-related and socio-indexical factors are equally critical in understanding the acquisition and maintenance of language-specific speech patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In his study of "forms of discourse", Bernstein (1999) differentiates what he refers to as horizontal discourse (everyday, commonsense knowledge) and vertical discourse (uncommonsense knowledge). He further distinguishes in vertical discourse two distinct modalities: "hierarchical knowledge structures" and "horizontal knowledge structures". The first of these corresponds to what Maton (2014) calls "scientific culture", and the second to "humanistic culture". Bernstein proposes that knowledge in the sciences is constructed by the integration of meanings, while in social sciences and the humanities by the segmented accumulation of different "languages". In a tradition of dialogue between systemic functional linguistics and Bernstein's sociology of knowledge, and later with its further development in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014; Christie and Martin, 2007; Hood, 2010; Christie and Maton, 2011), this paper explores how the kind of knowledge structures underlying different disciplines is revealed in differences in specific discourse semantic features of comparable texts written in Spanish. The features explored in the texts of the corpus are options of the system of appraisal (Martin and White, 2005; Hood and Martin, 2005). This system provides resources to negotiate feelings, values and different voices in discourse. Analyses apply the tools of the discourse system of appraisal to explore the ways in which knowledge claims are negotiated in a set of eight discussion sections from research articles in two disciplines, Microbiology and Sociology. The findings reveal interesting disciplinary differences that haven't been explored before in the frame of the dialogue of the two theories mentioned above on texts in Spanish. These findings can inform programs of support for academic Spanish across disciplines. Highlights • Knowledge construction. • Systemic functional linguistics. • System of appraisal. • Discussion section of research articles. • Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When configuring transmedia universes, it is necessary to design a map of contents that complies with a design of platforms and channels with its potential incidence on audience. In order to do this, we need to operate in a parallel manner between narrative displays and production design, which include the aesthetic line, technological devices and the design of potential audiences. In this paper these two broad perspectives converge, the production designer's and the storyteller's, delving into the joint processes that operate when it comes to building an architecture of transmedia contents, an operation that must be hand in hand with the corresponding technological solutions. All this is summarized in the case of Plot 28, a transmedia universe pioneer in Spanish language launched in January 2013 associated to a transmedia format (Total fiction). The creation experience interacts with the analytical and theoretical approach to offer a rather uncommon enriching perspective of the case of study. This way we will analyze, from a creator praxis, already corroborated but justified by the latest theoretical and hermeneutical approaches, narrative, interaction and gamification strategies, contents management and their scalability, the design of browsing maps, seeking the audience's empathy with the designed diegetic world. All this accompanied by data obtained from direct sources in this production and dissemination experience that may enlighten future projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the forms of address and greeting as part of the verbal politeness models identified both in Spanish and Romanian, in order to determine some similarities and differences between the two cultural models. This analysis reveals the existence of a tripartite system of hierarchical politeness in the Romanian language, whilst in Spanish there is a bipartite system, oriented towards the horizontal axis of interpersonal relationships. The act of greeting in Romanian goes by the system of hierarchical politeness and exhibits a lower degree of formality for the complementary greeting as compared to the Spanish cultural model. Leave-taking in Spanish culture covers a much more limited range of greeting forms than in romanian culture, where higher attention is drawn to everyday life events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the situation of both the Asturian and Spanish languages in schools and the consequences that derive from it. Thus, our study describes the diglossia situation from Asturias, where Asturian is a language for informal contexts, while the Castilian is the dominant language, which is associated with formal situations. Moreover, the Asturian language was not accepted in education until 1984, when it was introduced as an optional subject, a fact that contributed in a very significant way to the diglossia situation. Our research looks especially at the work of Riaño and San Fabián Maroto (1996) and highlights the importance of education in shaping the linguistic attitudes in Asturias. This way, we want to demonstrate that a greater presence of Asturian language in schools is necessary in order to change the situation of diglossia from Asturias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even if Lenormand's works are barely read or played in actual days, he was one of the avant-garde authors that generated more attention in the early twentieth century. The French author was enthusiastically welcomed by Spanish public. His works were frequently translated and played in Spanish theaters and intense debates were hold in literary reviews about how to interpret his characters. However, Lenormand's psychological conception of human being divided Spanish criticism in two groups: those who were in favour of his freudian proposals and those conservative critics who rejected Lenormand's novelties because they did not fit in the theatrical trends prevailing in early twentieth century Spain. Another controversial aspect in the Spanish reception of Lenormand's works was the alleged innovative nature of his theater: was he really an avant-garde author or did he merely relocate the great dramas of classical theater into the twentieth century? The aim of this paper is to study the diverse reactions stimulated by Lenormand's works among Spanish criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will focus on the Balearic Islands, the autonomous community of Spain, located in the western Mediterranean Sea. The focus is placed not only on the demography and the linguistic situation but primarily on the linguistic politics and the language legislation of this territory. The Balearic Islands have the same political autonomy as the other Autonomous Communities of Spain which, however, use it far less than the other communities. Catalan is not for local inhabitants, who do not feel a strong belonging to the Catalan speaking world, so an essential part of identity as for the inhabitants of Catalonia and therefore the linguistic question for the local politicians is not such a priority as for the politicians in Catalonia. Even the sense of identity on the Islands is less intense than in Catalonia or the Basque Country, thanks to the migration from the different parts of Spain and from abroad. Despite the emancipation efforts, which we can observe even in other parts of Spain, Catalan on the Balearic Islands, due to the reasons mentioned above contrary to Catalonia, does not have any chance to resist Spanish or even to overpower it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent work that argues in favor of a return to movement analyses for clitics (Uriagereka & Raposo 2005, Boeckx & Gallego , Roberts , ; Gallego), this paper explains why object clitics need to engage in probe/goal relations with agreeing verbs to value their Case features. A Case‐based account within Phase Theory (cf. Chomsky , ,) allows us to account for previously difficult to explain intervention and other displacement effects associated with these elements, and it also predicts clitic placement in a wide variety of ECM and causative constructions. Clitics in these constructions are sensitive to the timing and location of Case‐assigning mechanisms on the finite embedding verb, highlighting the importance of Case theory in deriving 'raising to object' phenomena in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of a contrastive analysis of the instances of attenuation occurring in a set of Argentine and Spanish colloquial conversations. Attenuation -understood as a pragmatic phenomenon reducing the illocutionary force of communicative acts, which involves face and the speakers' responsibilities for their messages (Caffi 1999, 2007; Thaler; Albelda 2016)- has been studied to a significant extent in the Spanish language, beginning in the 1990s, from the perspective of politeness studies (Haverkate; Briz 1995, 2007), pragmatics (Schneider) and sociolinguistics (Samper Hernández; Cestero). However, studies concentrating on the comparison between its diatopic varieties are scarce (Briz 2007; Albelda 2008). This study quantitatively and qualitatively analyses the attenuation resources utilized in colloquial conversations between speakers aged 20-34 at the higher and middle social strata in the cities of Tucumán (Argentina) and Valencia (Spain). The analysis was based on a methodological data sheet (Albelda/ others) with the aim of finding the main similarities and differences between both diatopic varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large part of the bibliography on evidential markers in Spanish points to mitigation of commitment (or responsibility) for what has been said as one of their defining features. However, the notion of mitigation and that of speaker commitment have both been used in different senses in different studies. In this paper, the meanings assigned to these terms are reviewed and, following Cornillie/Delbecque, the notions of speaker commitment and speaker involvement are distinguished. These operate in opposite directions in some evidential uses: (i) from reportative evidences to conjectural inferentials, there is a scale of lesser to greater speaker involvement; (ii) among the inferentials, a scale of greater to lesser speaker commitment ranging from circumstantials to conjecturals can be observed. This proposal is then applied to the evidentials por lo visto and se ve (que). The corpus shows that compared to por lo visto, se ve (que) indicates more mitigation of speaker commitment but greater speaker involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper presents a semantic analysis for Spanish ya , translated roughly into English as already. Ya has been treated in the literature in a diversity of ways: mostly as an adverb of time, but also as an aspectual marker, as a presuppositional adverb, as a focus marker, as a modal adverb, as an epistemic operator and as a conceptual anchor (Bosque, 1980; Löbner, 1989, 1999; Girón Alconchel, 1991; Garrido, 1993; García Fernández, 1999; Fernández and De Miguel, 1999; Pavón Lucero, 1999 ; Delbecque and Maldonado, 2009). We propose that the semantic content of this lexical item is better explained in procedural terms. We suggest that ya encodes in its semantics two semantic procedures: an instruction to incorporate in the interpretation an assumption about the transition from a previous state of affairs ([+DYNAMICITY]), and an instruction to incorporate in the context of interpretation a mutually manifest assumption about the previous continuity ([+DURATIVITY]) of that state of affairs. We will show how this semantic content operates along different cognitive domains to produce the wide variety of uses and pragmatic effects displayed by ya. Our results show the advantages of considering that semantic features such as dynamicity and durativity can be encoded in linguistic items either conceptually or procedurally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to determine and analyse the engagement markers used in the comments on the news published in the online papers El País (Spain) and Emol (Chile). The comments were selected from two different contexts: politics and sports. In this study we consider engagement markers as part of interactional metadiscourse, that is, the elements that involve readers to call their attention or to include them as participants of discourse (Hyland, 2005a). In this research, a corpus of 2,400 comments were compiled and tagged manually and with UAM Corpus Tool. The purpose of the analysis was to identify the metadiscoursal strategies used as engagement markers. The results showed that the writers that comment news in Emol and in El País used a similar amount of engagement markers; on the other hand, significative variation was not identified in the use of engagement markers in comments on politics and sports, although these markers were more frequently found in political comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of Spanish as a foreign language in North America during the 19th century prompted the publishing house Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt to edit in 1868 an anonymous handbook of pronunciation, lexicon, phrases, verbs and dialogues to teach Spanish in a short, easy and practical way. ¿Habla Vm. español? or Do you Speak English? collects the rudiments to perform in Spanish, especially through oral language, for those who wished to make a stay in Spain or in Latin America. Although the text is unoriginal in its content and formal presentation, it is part of linguistic historiography and the corpus of Spanish as a Foreign Language materials. This paper focuses on the analysis of ¿Habla Vm. español? or Do you Speak English?, the context in which it was written and the methodology used by Holt and Leypoldt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the language of child bilinguals and adult unbalanced bilinguals (heritage speakers) against that of bilingual native speakers of their home language (baseline). We identify four major vectors of correspondence across the language spoken by these three groups. First, all varieties may represent a given linguistic property in a similar way (child bilinguals = adult heritage speakers = bilingual native speakers of their home language). This occurs when either (i) the property in question is highly robust and is acquired by learners without difficulty or (ii) the property is already in decline in the baseline. We illustrate scenario (i) with data from Russian count forms, which are morphologically quite complex. The preservation of these forms in child bilinguals and adult heritage speakers suggests that simplicity of encoding is not the only factor determining robustness of retention. Second, child and heritage speakers may share a linguistic structure that differs from the one found in the baseline (bilingual native speakers of their home language ≠ child bilinguals = adult heritage speakers). This scenario occurs when incipient structural changes in the baseline become amplified in the language of next-generation bilinguals, or when a given structure is rare, confined to a specific register, and/or reinforced through literacy. Third, a structure may be acquired by bilingual children faithfully, but undergo reanalysis/attrition in the adult heritage language (bilingual native speakers of their home language = child bilinguals ≠ adult heritage speakers). Russian relativization illustrates this scenario; child bilinguals show native-like performance on relative clauses but adult heritage speakers show an exaggerated subject preference in the interpretation of gaps. Finally, a structure that is not fully learned by child speakers may be reanalyzed by adult heritage speakers following general principles, thus bringing the adult heritage representation closer to that of the baseline (bilingual native speakers of their home language = adult heritage speakers ≠ child bilinguals). Heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of psychological predicates in Spanish illustrates this possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on gender assignment to Spanish-English mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) have noticed a tendency to default to the masculine gender (e.g. el store). However, some studies have revealed that other factors such as the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent (analogical criterion) are also relevant, particularly in written discourse (e.g. la conference). Further, it has been hypothesized that feminine-marked mixed DPs in oral discourse, which are viewed as exceptions to the default gender strategy, should be highly restricted to singleton switches (Valdés Kroff 2016). This paper investigates if feminine-marked mixed DPs are restricted to singleton switches in written discourse by analyzing a mixed-language text, which contains both types of switches (singleton and multiword). The results confirm the importance of the analogical criterion in written discourse and show that feminine-marked DPs are not restricted to singleton switches, and that the analogical criterion is relevant to both singleton and multiword switches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In minority language revitalisation contexts, the determination of proficiency in the minoritised language is a sensitive social issue that affects citizens regardless of their linguistic background. From a psychometric perspective, since the target population is heterogeneous, competence assessment instruments must ensure score validity for each linguistic subgroup. Focused on the Basque Autonomous Community (Spain), in this paper, we introduce the Basque Competence Assessment examination (known by its acronym EGA) and assess the factorial invariance of the writing section using a structural equation modelling approach. Data were collected from 2554 candidates classified into three groups according to mother tongue: Spanish, Basque, and Basque/Spanish. The results show the near invariance of the writing section of the EGA and that the highest performance was found in the Basque mother-tongue examinees. Results also reinforce the importance of validation analysis in language diversity contexts to guarantee fairness in test-based decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words meanings and their use in the language are not fixed in time. This is the case of the word humor, whose current meaning is new in Spanish, as it is attested in dictionaries. Lexicographic discourse can reveal enough data about the history of words. Therefore, the aim of this research is to find out the concept of humor that appears from the first papers in the Spanish lexicography, from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Taking Covarrubias's dictionary (1611) as a turning point, a corpus of dictionaries has been compiled to do research on how the subject of humor was treated by the selection of voices related to it. The results are sufficiently clear in respect to the prudence with which this subject was conceived, as well as to its pragmatically marked use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of social media in the academic community has become very popular in recent years, especially among undergraduate students (Espuny et al., 2011; Gómez-Aguilar et al., 2012; Cancelo Sanmartín & Almansa Martínez, 2013). Besides, Spanish speaking undergraduates usually make use of English when communicating among them in higher education scenarios. Consequently, in this paper we try to detect code-switching cases by undergraduate students in academic scenarios through social media. The methodology used heavily relies on corpus. In a Spanish monolingual corpus composed of samples of communication through social media among undergraduate students enrolled in the Degree of Translation and Interpreting (Uni-versity of Valladolid, Spain) we detect code-switching cases and analyze them. Results might provide us with data to be aware of the deviations from the Spanish rules. In addition, they might allow us to adopt corrective measures through the creation of new tools to improve academic communication through social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that Spanish prenominal and postnominal possessives target different external merge positions focusing on alienable possessive constructions. The analysis is developed alongside a proposal on the organization of DPs, according to which articles are merged as a DP-internal category between the domains assigned to direct and indirect modifiers. Prenominal possessives are determiners reanalyzed from direct modification adjectives whereas postnominal possessives are indirect modification adjectives that arise as predicates of reduced relative clauses. This analysis provides a principled explanation on the behavior of Spanish possessives that is lacking in the generalized idea that they are pronouns with a unique merge position. Arguments are also presented showing that syntax-driven phonological restrictions condition the derivation of DPs. The account successfully derives the core properties of word order variation and related issues within possessive constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, linguistic research has been focusing more on the analysis of language usage from various sperspectives. Among those approaches, the socio pragmatic one regards language usage as a real, immediate ephenomenon affected by social context in a given situation. The sestudiesincludethoseon verbal politeness, and also on it so ther face, i.e., impoliteness, violence and aggressiveness, which in creasing levels have fortunately been accompanied by more research on them. A vast number of researchers of the Spanish language have conducted studies on the characteristics of such utterances and the variations in their use through out different regions of the Hispanic world. This paper aims to analyze, from the conversation al analysis perspective, the use of violent forms of address by speakers of the borough of Distrito José Martí Sur A and B; thus, contributing to the study of language usage in the Eastern region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an acoustic study describing the vowel spaces of bilingual Quechua–Spanish speakers in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with a particular focus on the height of mid and high vowels, in order to explore longstanding questions about the nature of Quechua vowel categories. South Bolivian Quechua is generally described as phonemically trivocalic with high-vowel lowering in presence of uvular consonants, but there has been little acoustic study of vowel formant characteristics (Cerrón-Palomino 1987, Laime Ajacopa, Cazazola & Pairumani 2007). The current study quantifies previous impressionistic observations of the vowel system and describes the acoustic properties of the Quechua vowels. Eleven bilingual speakers of South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish were recorded in a Quechua translation task and a Spanish list-reading task. Results of Bayesian models indicate that Quechua high vowels do appear to undergo systematic lowering following uvular consonants, supporting earlier descriptions. The results also demonstrate that lowering is consistent throughout the duration of the vowels, challenging a purely coarticulatory motivation for the observed lowering pattern. The allophonic mid-vowels of Quechua and the phonemic high and mid vowels of Spanish also have formant characteristics that may differ from one another, providing evidence for the hypothesis that these bilingual speakers could potentially command two separate vowel systems with different bases of articulation. These findings are also relevant for questions related to the nature of three-vowel systems, and whether or not they may contain true mid-vowel allophones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to investigate the polysemy of Spanish spatial prepositions (a, en, hacia, among others), and offer a syntactic and semantic treatment of this phenomenon. The core idea behind this account is that these prepositions can denote sets of possible locations that are involved in spatial relations. Consequently, the compositional interaction of polysemous prepositions with other parts of speech can determine which specific sense emerges in a sentence. The analysis is couched in a Type- Logical Grammar approach. It addresses data that have not previously been analysed in the literature, involving so-called Boolean constructions (e.g. en la estación y la calle). Also, the paper shows that a single treatment can capture all the relevant data. Therefore, the analysis shows that polysemy is a grammar phenomenon that is better accounted for in architectures with a distinct syntactic/derivational component (e.g. Distributed Morphology), than in architectures lacking this component (e.g. Cognitive Linguistics approaches). Consequences for a theory of grammar are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates TP-ellipsis with a polarity particle in Spanish, with particular attention to its occurrence in multiple-complementizer clauses (i.e., ... que XP que ellipsis licensor ellipsis site). The paper argues for a version of the standard ΣPaccount of TP-ellipsis, with the polarity/focal item (e.g., también/tampoco/sí/no) crucially involved in the licensing of ellipsis. It is argued that the XP-que sequence is hosted in TopicP. The XP is a contrastive topic functioning as the remnant of TP-ellipsis and que instantiates recomplementation que -a topic marker. The ellipsis licensor, for its part, sits in a CP-related projection that follows TopicP. In light of the parallelism drawn here between the polarity elements that can partake in the licensing of TP-ellipsis and run-of-the-mill foci, the paper provides a host of arguments from Spanish and related languages underscoring the role of focus in this type of ellipsis operation, which may ultimately lead to the conflation of ΣP and FocusP. Similarly, I explore the relationship established between TopicP (the remnant) and ΣP/FocusP (the ellipsis licensor) in the process of TP-ellipsis as well as offer a principled account of the inability of jussive/optative que to survive ellipsis, unlike recomplementation que. The results of this paper therefore have wide-ranging consequences for the derivation of TP-ellipsis phenomena alongside the delineation of the preverbal field in Spanish and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar( e)+ a+infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothesis that due to their lexical origin, iterative constructions develop from a restitutive to a repetitive function. A diachronic analysis of a corpus of RETURN+INF tokens from the three languages suggests that the grammaticalization of RETURN+INF constructions can be measured in terms of (a) actionality and (b) restructuring as mirrored in the possibility of clitic climbing. A statistical analysis using generalized linear mixed-effects regression modeling demonstrates an interplay between restructuring and the actionality of the predicates in the development of RETURN+INF constructions: the grammaticalization process affects state, achievement, and accomplishment predicates before activity predicates because activity predicates exclude a restitutive meaning. The paper thus identifies a grammaticalization path for RETURN+INF constructions common to three Romance languages that suggests a link between typological and diachronic observations. At the same time, it identifies differences in the diachronic development of these periphrases between the Ibero-Romance languages and Italian. In addition, it proposes a statistical means of assessing quantitative differences in the degree to which a verbal periphrasis is grammaticalized across related languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a colony of the United States since 1898, Puerto Rico has continuously been pressured to incorporate English as a co-official language along with Spanish, the vernacular of the majority of islanders. This paper presents the historical context of language education policy in Puerto Rico as a case study in order to understand Spanish language maintenance despite more than 115 years of U.S. colonization. After providing a brief review of literature regarding perceptions of language threat and how they have traditionally been viewed, the paper uses the island's context to explore the impact that strong perceptions of threat can have on language maintenance and societal bilingualism. The paper explores the perceptions of threat associated with English in Puerto Rico and ultimately argues that the colonization practices and the on-going political environment have positioned English as a problem, which has consequently led to a primarily monolingual island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources for selecting synonyms and strategies for word sense disambiguation in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguation. We present a novel evaluation framework in lexical simplification that takes into account the level of ambiguity of the word to be simplified. The evaluation compares various instances of the lexical simplification system, a gold standard, and a baseline. The paper presents an in-depth qualitative error analysis of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to reflect about the relationships between lexicalization and grammaticaiization in the emergence of Spanish verbal periphrases. We will analyse the evolution of three verbal periphrases (venir + a + infinitive, tener + de + infinitive, ir + y + verbal finite group) and we will try to demonstrate that there is a first stage that can be defined as lexicalization in its formation, because three different collocations are formed. In a second step, grammaticaiization takes place, since these collocations evolve to routinized verbal constructions fully productive specialised In expressing modal and temporal values. In this paper we will follow a usage-based approach to language change, combined with the assumptions of the theory of grammaticaiization and with Construction Grammar. We will base our study on data extrated from consulting the RAE corpora (CREA Y CORDE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the distribution of a phonetically null pronoun and the clitic lo referring to a proposition as the direct object (DO) of cognition and communication verbs in Spanish. The use of this null object referring to propositions is found cross-dialectally in Spanish, and this paper argues that the completeness of the proposition constrains in crucial ways the distribution of these two propositional anaphors. The analysis of five different cases in which the DO pronoun refers to an incomplete proposition illustrates that the null object is the anaphor preferred when the proposition being referred to is incomplete, whereas the propositional pronoun lo is preferred to refer to complete propositions. Completeness of the proposition - defined here as a gradient feature and not a binary distinction - is discussed in relation to the notion of saliency or accessibility of the referent and the data analyzed in this article for propositional anaphora is discussed in relation to NP anaphora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the connection between Spanish concessive future and evidentiality. More specifically, it is argued that concessive future does not merely represent a contextual variant of conjectural future ( Escandell, 2010 ) but a new use ( Squartini, 2012 ) which is restricted by the activated status of the proposition ( Dryer, 1996 ). Unlike conjectural future, concessive future does not have an inferential purpose; instead, it plays a role within the (counter) argumentation process. It actually develops a déréalisant function ( Ducrot, 1995 ). Therefore, although conjectural use and concessive use share the deictic value of future, they are the projection of this value over different levels of meaning. More generally, this paper shows that future in Spanish may intersect with several semantic and discourse categories, including – but not limited to – evidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Linguistic domains (vocabulary, phonetics, syntax) do not change independently in the development of languages. • Relationships among linguistic domains do not follow a uniform or universal pattern. • Linguistic distances between all of the modern languages predict traditional phylogenetic trees to a high degree. Languages differ along multiple dimensions (lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax). Related languages descend from a common ancestor language but have diverged over time. This paper asks whether languages diverge equally along all dimensions, and, to the extent that they do not, which dimension reflects the traditional language family tree best. We computed measures of (i) lexical distance (ii) phonetic distance, and (iii) syntactic distance. The measures were computed on all words and sentences extracted from a corpus of translations of four relatively short English texts into another four Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, Swedish), five Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish) and six Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian). We examined the correlation structure of the distances for all pairs of Germanic (10), Romance (10) and Slavic (15) languages (i.e., within-family comparisons only). The results indicate that the linguistic dimensions are generally correlated (weakly but significantly), and that the correlations are stronger for pairs within families than when all 35 pairs are examined together. Cladistic family trees correlate best with the lexical distance (0.851 < r < 0.887). This confirms that the genealogical language trees are predominantly based on lexical rather than phonetic or syntactic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language varieties should be taken into account in order to enhance fluency and naturalness of translated texts. In this paper we will examine the collocational verbal range for prima-facie translation equivalents of words like decision and dilemma, which in both languages denote the act or process of reaching a resolution after consideration, resolving a question or deciding something. We will be mainly concerned with diatopic variation in Spanish. To this end, we set out to develop a giga-token corpus-based protocol which includes a detailed and reproducible methodology sufficient to detect collocational peculiarities of transnational languages. To our knowledge, this is one of the first observational studies of this kind. The paper is organised as follows. Section 1 introduces some basic issues about the translation of collocations against the background of languages' anisomorphism. Section 2 provides a feature characterisation of collocations. Section 3 deals with the choice of corpora, corpus tools, nodes and patterns. Section 4 covers the automatic retrieval of the selected verb + noun (object) collocations in general Spanish and the co-existing national varieties. Special attention is paid to comparative results in terms of similarities and mismatches. Section 5 presents conclusions and outlines avenues of further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the use of linguistic information for the selection of data to train language models. We depart from the state-of-the-art method in perplexity-based data selection and extend it in order to use word-level linguistic units (i.e. lemmas, named entity categories and part-of-speech tags) instead of surface forms. We then present two methods that combine the different types of linguistic knowledge as well as the surface forms (1, naïve selection of the top ranked sentences selected by each method; 2, linear interpolation of the datasets selected by the different methods). The paper presents detailed results and analysis for four languages with different levels of morphologic complexity (English, Spanish, Czech and Chinese). The interpolation-based combination outperforms the purely statistical baseline in all the scenarios, resulting in language models with lower perplexity. In relative terms the improvements are similar regardless of the language, with perplexity reductions achieved in the range 7.72–13.02%. In absolute terms the reduction is higher for languages with high type-token ratio (Chinese, 202.16) or rich morphology (Czech, 81.53) and lower for the remaining languages, Spanish (55.2) and English (34.43 on the English side of the same parallel dataset as for Czech and 61.90 on the same parallel dataset as for Spanish). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an interactional analysis of discourse-connective que-constructions in Spanish. In particular, we discuss how these constructions operate at discourse level and we analyze the kind of interactional activities conversation participants are engaged in while using them. In previous studies, initial que has been described along the following lines: as an expletive element, as a marker of background information, as a modal particle, as signaling the presence of the speaker, and as part of a quotative construction. Nevertheless, analyses of free-standing que-constructions are usually based on subjective data from introspection and tend to focus only on the clause introduced by que, regardless of its discourse context. Our hypothesis is that the meaning of discourse-connective que-constructions is primarily indexical: they refer to a relevant piece of contextual information that can be retrieved from a previous utterance or turn, a previous discourse situation, a proposition being observed or one that is inferable from the speech situation. This paper helps define the discourse contexts where que-constructions are used more precisely, while also providing a description of the situated meanings que-constructions express in particular types of context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a functional account of directives in spontaneous conversations in Spanish. More specifically, we address the use of imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with a directive meaning in interactions among equals. We start our analysis from Searle's Speech Act Theory. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood function in terms of the range of speech acts and degree of prototypicality within the category of directives. In order to do so, we describe the functional range of both constructions and the syntactic differences among them. It is argued that que-clauses are displaced directives, expressing atypical directivity. We also posit a functional division of labor between prototypical imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood. The study is based on the analysis of 57 conversations among adolescents from Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile (COLA corpus). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this volume examine how Spanish speakers express attention to their interlocutors (or co-participants) verbally. It is now generally accepted that subjective expressions have interactional functions, encouraging the flow of discussion and creating cohesive discourse and that there are several ways of dealing with the intersubjective or dialogic nature of language: (i) studying heteroglossia or dialoguing voices in monologic texts, (ii) focusing on how in talk-in-interaction speakers refer to information held by the co-participant, (iii) examining intersubjective markers that encode the speaker's assumptions about the co-participant. Concepts such as politeness, argumentation structure, attenuation and hedging are being used to account for the interactional dynamics examined. Moreover, several papers analyze the difference between spoken and written registers and some offer new evidence for functional paths of linguistic change. In doing so, they enrich previous accounts of modality, discourse markers, person referencing, spatial deixis and connectives in Spanish and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to embrace an exploration about the orthographic issue, not just at present time, but from the early writings that claimed its importance for the precise understanding through the use of word and paper. Moreover, it revises the proposals made by such important writers as García Márquez or Juan Ramón Jiménez. Also, there is an analysis of some representative examples extracted from textbooks in order to verify in which degree the rules provided by the current legislation and the Academy are implemented in the classroom. Finally, these pages include references and reflection on the theories and studies made by researchers on this topic, as they are expert voices that is necessary to take into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]