Search

The present paper aims to describe the process of creating CHARG—Corpus de Habla Radiofónica de Guayaquil (the Guayaquil Radiophonic Speech Corpus). It is the first systematized spoken corpus for this rather under-researched variety of Spanish. Guayaquil is the most populated city of Ecuador, while its capital city is Quito. Therefore, Ecuador is a rare case of a Spanish-speaking country with two major urban centers that belong to two separate dialectal zones, offering a very peculiar sociolinguistic context. CHARG is a corpus composed of Guayaquil radio programs. Its structure is organized by non-linguistic criteria (program type) in order to ensure a representative and balanced sample. The paper describes the design of the corpus (defining the study population, sample and stratification) and its construction (recording procedure, speakers and speech style coding, transcription and annotation). As a result, CHARG consists of 24 h of transcriptions and annotations of recordings from 142 speakers. The paper's potential use is twofold: since it presents a step-by-step procedure of corpus construction that can be replicated, the readers might be interested in both the procedure and the corpus itself as a research material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of Spanish verbs of becoming (e.g., volverse rico 'to become rich'), also known as pseudocopular or semicopular verbs, has received relatively little attention in the literature. Bybee & Eddington (2006) (B&E) analyze these verbs employing an exemplar model based on frequency and semantic similarity. The current paper presents an analysis of verbs of becoming based on the notion of cluster concepts (Jackendoff 2002, 2019, 1983), set within a scale, as an alternative account to B&E's, that explains the behavior of this class of verbs in a more precise and comprehensive way. The current study shows that there are strong tendencies in the use of adjectives with a given verb of becoming, which correlate to their use with the copular verbs ser/estar. Crucially, the cluster concept model accounts for uses of adjectives that do not fall into any particular grouping in B&E's model. A corpus study supports the analysis. The current study represents an original contribution in that it is the only study that treats verbs of becoming using the notion of cluster concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic features --nuclear pitch configurations and pitch range-- of neutral and oriented interrogative utterances in the Spanish of Mexico City. We carried out a study of polar and wh- questions recorded in the free conversation module of the Corpus Norma Lingüística Culta (Lope Blanch 1971) and Habla Popular de la Ciudad de México (Lope Blanch 1976). The findings of the qualitative analysis show: i) the nuclear pitch configuration L* (L)H% --with the variants L* (L)H%, L* ¡H%, !H* ¡H%-- in information-seeking yes-no questions and confirmation questions, ii) the nuclear configuration L* L% documented in neutral wh- questions, and the boundary tone H% produced in the non-neutral condition --hypothetical or confirmative-- of the utterance; iii) the use of the pitch range as a potential prosodic resource for the expression of lesser or greater knowledge about the expected answer. The spontaneous speech data partially confirm the descriptions based on discourse completion tasks for this variety of Spanish (de-la-Mota et al. 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses concessive resources with a mitigating function which are found in argumentative acts in the PRESEEA corpus from Santiago, Chile. Based on data from 36 semi-structured interviews, the behaviour of concessive-oppositional moves and concessive discourse particles in argumentative acts is analyzed, and their sociolinguistic variation is described in relation to the speakers' gender, age and level of education. The key findings highlight that in Chilean Spanish there are at least 12 strategies that fulfill a mitigating concessive function, among which "sí, pero (yes, but) + negation", "aunque (even though)", "no, pero (no, but) + assertion" and "a pesar (de) que (despite the fact that)" stand out. These strategies are linked to the functions of self-protection and face prevention in the development of the argumentative act. Furthermore, it is also observed that the variation is mostly due to the subject's age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the most significant results derived from the preliminary semantic analysis carried out on the 455 Spanish prepositional resultatives headed by the telic preposition hasta that conform our corpus. Specifically, we will show that their meaning is not homogenous since two clear cases are to be differentiated: on the one hand, those which have literal meaning, like hasta la muerte in La misma asesina, por lo tanto, que torturó a Loperena hasta la muerte, and on the other, those with a figurative interpretation, like hasta el agotamiento in La curiosidad lo hizo esforzarse hasta el agotamiento. Though both readings entail a hyperbolic meaning of excess and exaggeration, we will demonstrate, furthermore, that only the latter, called degree resultatives, following Hoeksema and Napoli (2019), have recently developed an intensifying function in the language which is increasingly growing as time goes by. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new concept, discursive interpersonality, as a flexibilized model of interpersonal metadiscourse (IM). Departing from the proven validity of IM (Hyland, 2005a, 2005b) as a framework to analyse interpersonal relations between writers/speakers and readers/listeners, our argumentation is grounded on our research results, stemming from the study of different academic and professional genres. Since interpersonal metadiscourse is conditioned by contextual variables, such as genre, discipline, language and corpus, as an array of authors suggest (Dahl, 2004; Sala, 2006; Yakhontova, 2006; Giannoni, 2007; Mapelli, 2008; Crismore & Abdollazadeh, 2010; Gotti, 2010; Lorés-Sanz, 2011a; Ivorra Pérez, 2015, 2016; Suau-Jiménez, 2016; Mattiello, 2018; Turiman et al., 2018; Herrando-Rodrigo, 2019), IM would need to be redefined or readapted, including new markers, new lexico-grammatical realizations. As a result and very importantly, propositionality should be considered a theoretical central feature that contributes to interpersonal interactions but that traditional approaches of IM do not accept as such. So, a new, more encompassing concept needs to be coined that accounts for all these essential aspects. Assuming how interpersonal metadiscourse has been defined conventionally (Mauranen, 1993a, 1993b; Hyland, 2005a, 2017), we propose two integrative concepts: discursive turn (Jaworski & Pritchard, 2005), not in its philosophical sense but in one that sees discourse as an identity axis or departure point for analysis, and interpersonality (Lorés-Sanz et al., 2010), considered as an umbrella term broader than IM. Discursive interpersonality might thus open more satisfactory paths for further research in a variety of genres, domains and languages. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

The purpose of this article is to present the design features of the DIACOM corpus, a tool for the study of the field-specific lexis related to trade and commerce in the Spanish and French language. This study, carried out by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona (Italy) within the framework of a government-funded project, aims at developing the field of Digital Humanities and specifically its application in linguistic and philological research. The paper addresses the issues related to designing the Spanish subcorpus, particularly the ones which have proved especially problematic in the building of a diachronic corpus within the area taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a non-normative phenomenon almost unknown in Spanish, the "pluralization" of adverbs in -mente (lugares realmentes sorprendentes 'places really surprising'), which is not found in the main grammars of this language. From the data of Corpus del español we propose to make known this phenomenon, to show in which countries it is documented and with what frequency. Later, we analyze which adverbs in -mente show this final -s in current Spanish and in what syntactic contexts are given. In particular, we show that the kind of adverbs that are involved in this phenomenon are degree, modality, and focusing adverbs, mainly when they modify adjectives or sentences. Finally, we propose an explanation of the presence of this final -s based on two different processes that the Spanish language undergoes in the grammatical category of adverbs: adverbial agreement, which so far has been described for quantifier adverbs, and adverb "false" pluralization. [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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper looks at the stigmatized use of impersonal se with a plural verb and the prepositional accusative. While this pattern occurs commonly in speech and many forms of writing, it has to all intents been airbrushed from academic consideration of Spanish. On the one hand, the normative authorities dismiss it as an error and on the other it is studiously ignored by professional linguists. Given the pattern's de facto productivity, it is argued in this paper that its exclusion from the standard corpus is essentially arbitrary, the result of a priori assumptions about what should be possible in grammar rather than detached scientific consideration of what actually occurs. More specifically, both prescriptive grammar and theoretical linguistics take it as axiomatic that (in languages like Spanish) number agreement on the finite verb is determined by the subject and never by the object. The pattern discussed here is irreconcilable with that view and, accordingly, has come to be treated as a non-legitimate datum. The case thus provides a good illustration of how the concept of grammaticality, supposedly the empirical foundation of modern syntax, may be no less arbitrary than the older normative principle of correct usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the referring properties of post-nominal demonstratives in Spanish with an aim to contributing to our present understanding of this marked construction. A corpus analysis is presented, where 600 cases of pre- and post-nominal demonstratives are analyzed based on their discourse anaphoric properties: direct vs. indirect anaphora. The data reveal that post-nominal demonstratives are significantly preferred in cases of indirect anaphora; that is, where no antecedent is linguistically realized in the discourse, and the reference of the demonstrative anaphor has to be inferred from the discourse or situational context. Pre-nominal demonstratives, on the other hand, show a more balanced picture sharing similar numbers in direct and indirect anaphora. However, the data also reveal that post-nominal demonstratives can be used in direct anaphoric uses, which poses a problem for a categorical distinction between pre- and postnominal demonstratives at the referential level. Since variability appears to be the nature of the phenomenon, I propose a uniform presuppositional characterization for pre- and post-nominal demonstratives that is able to account for the observed referential flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a programmatic proposal for the characterisation, or profiling, of editorials from the Spanish newspaper El País on the dimension of the explicit signalling of intersentential relations for purposes of comparison. The study adopts an integrated discourse as process approach to the description of language, in conjunction with some of the basic tenets of corpus linguistics. The paper advocates strict specificity and differentiation of text types in such studies and a rigorous respect for the intrasentential, the intersentential and the interparagraph segmentation which authors impose on their texts. Figures are offered for the frequency of selected connectors in a corpus of one whole year of editorials from this newspaper, together with information relating to their sentence and paragraph position. Additional consideration is given to important alternative means for the expression of intersentential relations and to questions related to corpus extent in studies of this nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how the use of bilingual and translation corpora proves to be an invaluable resource for the exploration of lexicogrammatical patterns in the context of the contrastive linguistics classroom. The experience reported in this paper is part of a larger project where postgraduate students of Contrastive Linguistics (English-Spanish) at a large Spanish University (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) participate in the discovery of lexicogrammatical patterns in both languages through the use of bilingual (English-Spanish) comparable corpora, and parallel translation corpora. Using as a point of departure some theoretical issues which have received attention in previous descriptive research, the paper describes a series of guided corpus-based tasks carried out by learners in the area of mental transitivity in English and Spanish. These yielded interesting contrastive and translation results, which, it is suggested, can be fruitfully exploited as the source for teaching materials which systematically compare the major transitivity patterns in English and Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an English-Spanish corpus-based contrastive study of multiple modification within the boundaries of the noun phrase. This issue is particularly problematic when comparing English and Spanish, and causes difficulties in foreign language learning as well as in translation processes between the two languages. The aim of this study is to unveil the interaction between meaning and grammar in this linguistic area in English and Spanish, revealing the different grammatical structures used in the two languages to actualise a particular meaning. The approach followed in this paper is a functional one (Bondarko 1991; Chesterman 1998). The empirical data on which the study is based are instances of authentic language in use extracted from two large monolingual reference corpora, Cobuild/Bank of English and CREA (Reference Corpus of Contemporary Spanish). The contrastive analysis consists of three stages: description, juxtaposition and a contrastive stage in which functional-semantic correspondences are suggested on the basis of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explaining why the same passage may have different rhetorical structures when conveyed in different languages remains an open question. Starting from a trilingual translation corpus, this paper aims to provide a new qualitative method for the comparison of rhetorical structures in different languages and to specify why translated texts may differ in their rhetorical structures. To achieve these aims we have carried out a contrastive analysis, comparing a corpus of parallel English, Spanish and Basque texts, using Rhetorical Structure Theory. We propose a method to describe the main linguistic differences among the rhetorical structures of the three languages in the two annotation stages (segmentation and rhetorical analysis). We show a new type of comparison that has important advantages with regard to the quantitative method usually employed: it provides an accurate measurement of inter-annotator agreement, and it pinpoints sources of disagreement among annotators. With the use of this new method, we show how translation strategies affect discourse structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the IULA Spanish LSP Treebank, an open-source treebank of over 40,000 sentences, developed in the framework of the European project METANET4U. The IULA Spanish LSP Treebank is the first technical corpus of Spanish annotated at surface syntactic level, following the dependency grammar theory. We present the method we used to create the resource and the linguistic annotations that the treebank provides, using examples and comparing with similar resources. We also provide the statistics of the treebank and the evaluation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the development of a text simplification system for Spanish. Text simplification is the adaptation of a text for the special needs of certain groups of readers, such as language learners, people with cognitive difficulties, and elderly people, among others. There is a clear need for simplified texts, but manual production and adaptation of existing text is labour-intensive and costly. Automatic simplification is a field which attracts growing attention in Natural Language Processing, but, to the best of our knowledge, there are no existing simplification tools for Spanish. We present a corpus study which aims to identify the operations a text simplification system needs to carry out in order to produce an output similar to what human editors produce when they simplify news texts. We also present a first prototype for automatic simplification, which shows that the most important simplification operations can be successfully treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammar studies have focused lately on speech instead of on written language, being the latter the most traditional approach. This situation confronts us with the necessity of a new definition for some grammar concepts. This paper proposes a new definition for the concept of sentence so that it can be used for spoken Spanish analysis. Already existing definitions are evaluated and discarded because they do not fit with many normal speech structures. Besides, they usually are confusing regarding syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic features. We propose a new definition only based on grammar and semantic features. Conclusions show that this approach allows the syntactic analysis of speech in a much more accurate way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will examine three aspects of communicative immediacy in eighteenth century documents from the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish in the Kingdom of Granada (CORDEREGRA): the use of -ico, -illo and -ito, the variation diferiencia/diferencia, osted/usted and defunto/difunto, and the loss of /d/. We want to emphasise three methodological aspects in the study of orality: the importance of a control corpus, the problems that CORDE has for the historical study of colloquial Spanish and the value of the current sociolinguistic data to interpret the history of a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on recent and near-term future developments at FrameNet (FN) and the interoperability issues they raise. We begin by discussing the current state of the Berkeley FN database including major changes in the data format for the latest data release. We then briefly review two recent local projects, "Rapid Vanguarding', which has created a new interface for the frame and lexical unit definition process based on the Word Sketch Engine of Kilgarriff et al. (), and 'Beyond the Core', which has developed tools for annotating constructions, and created a sample 'construction' of especially 'interesting' constructions which are neither simply lexical nor easy for the standard parsers to parse. We also cover two current collaborations, FN's part in the development of the manually annotated subcorpus of the American National Corpus, and a pilot study on aligning WordNet and FrameNet, to exploit the complementary strengths of these quite different resources. We discuss FN-related research on Spanish, Japanese, German (SALSA), Chinese and other languages, and the language-independence of frames, along with interesting FN-related work by others, and a sketch of a large group of image-schematic frames which are now being added to FN. We close with some ideas about how FrameNet can be opened up, to allow broader participation in the development process without losing precision and coherence, including a small-scale study on acquiring data for FN using Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The main objective of this paper is to show the differences and similarities in the use of demonstrative forms in Polish and Spanish, which arise not only from differences paradigmatic (Spanish ternary system vs Polish binary system), but also pragmatic context. With the help of electronic corpora the author tries to answer the question of what factors influence the conceptualization of these deictic expressions in both languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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