A contrastive study of conventional indirectness in Spanish

The concept of meaning is a complex one in language study when cultural features are added. This is mandatory because language cannot be completely separated from culture in which case language and culture complement each other. When there are two varieties of a language in a society, i.e. two varieties functioning side by side in a speech community, there is tendency for misconception. It is therefore imperative to make a linguistic comparative study of varieties of such languages. In this paper, a semantic contrastive study is made between Standard British English (SBE) and Nigerian English (NE). The semantic study is limited to aspects of semantics: semantic extension (Kinship terms, metaphors), semantic shift (lexical items considered are ‘drop’ ‘befriend’ ‘dowry’ and escort) acronyms (NEPA, JAMB, NTA) linguistic borrowing or loan words (Seriki, Agbada, Eba, Dodo, Iroko) coinages (long leg, bush meat; bottom power and juju). In the study of these aspects of semantics of SBE and NE lexical terms, conservative statements are made, problems areas and hierarchy of difficulties are highlighted with a view to bringing out areas of differences. The study will also serve as a guide in further contrastive studies in some other levels of languages.

Thanking, as other speech acts such as apologizing or requesting, can be performed in numerous contexts and, for their analysis, many crucial variables must be taken into consideration (eg. social distance, gender, age, etc.), which often are difficult to control. Besides these variables, speech acts are carried out in different situations, taking into account the culture in which they are performed. For example, thanking might be performed after alighting a bus in the UK, the USA or Australia, but this might not necessarily happen in Spain. The aim of the study on which this paper is based, in to explore thanking contrastively in British English and in Peninsular Spanish from a pragmatic viewpoint, by looking at specific independent variables: the context and situation in which this speech act is performed, the relationship between the interlocutors who perform it, which includes social power and distance, and the reason for expressing gratitude. For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus of 128 textbooks (64 for each language) for the learning and teaching of Spanish and English as foreign languages was used. It is important to note that, although these corpora are built on prefabricated dialogues and these can be regarded as abstractions of reality, the communicative situations found in the textbooks are aimed at depicting exchanges and linguistic patterns representing what naturally occurs in real conversations in both cultures.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

Infant-directed speech has been shown to be different from adult-directed speech in that it is generally characterized by short, acoustically exaggerated (e.g. higher F0 peaks, wider F0 range) utterances (Fernald et al., 1989; Kitamura et al., 2001, inter alia). Thus, at some point parents begin to change these acoustic parameters once the child is no longer an infant. The present study uses longitudinal data to compare F0 use in two language varieties, American English (AE) and Peninsular Spanish (PS), in an effort to understand how two prosodic aspects (mean F0 and F0 range) change after a child’s first birthday. Specifically, we asked how these parameters might change as a function of the child’s linguistic development, here defined as the children’s mean length of utterance (MLU). Results show that mothers show changes in their use of both of these parameters after the second birthday, with turning points between 28 and 31 months. MLU was not found to be a significant predictor for either language. Additionally, despite differences in how AE and PS exploit F0 for expressing focus, both AE- and PS-speaking mothers were shown to use more narrow F0 range for utterances not containing a focused element sometime after 30 months. Implications for language acquisition are discussed.

This paper reports the results of a study on the prosodic marking of broad and contrastive focus in three language varieties of which two are in contact: bilingual Peruvian Spanish, Quechua and Peninsular Spanish. An interactive communicative task revealed that the prosodic marking of contrastive focus was limited in all three language varieties. No systematic correspondence was observed between specific contour/accent types and focus, and the phonetic marking of contrastive focus was weak and restricted to phrase-final position. Interestingly, we identified two contours for bilingual Peruvian Spanish that were present in Quechua, but not in Peninsular Spanish, providing evidence for a prosodic transfer from Quechua to Spanish in Quechua-Spanish bilinguals.

Clitic doubling (CD) is the co-appearance in the same sentence of the clitic and a correlative syntagma in the canonical position of the object. Apart from obligatory contexts, CD of the indirect object (IO) is found with variable frequency in Romance languages and even in different varieties of the same language, most likely because it is a phenomenon of internal/external language interface. The objective of this work is to determine the frequency of CD in non-obligatory contexts of recipient and location IO in peninsular Spanish, and to analyse its features according to the referential hierarchy used for the diachronic evolution of the phenomenon. For this purpose, we extracted data from two open access corpora of interviews (COREC and PRESEEA) from different regions that are (or are not) areas of historical contact with other languages. The results show a significant extension of doubling in contexts where this is optional and the neutralisation of features that previously predicted CD of IOs. Nevertheless, there are geographical differences in peninsular Spanish in terms of frequency, definiteness, specificity, the influence of the cliticization of the direct object, and the accessibility of the IO referents in the minds of the speakers.

Reviewed by: Culture et mots de la table: comment parle-t-on de la nourriture et de la cuisine en termes académiques, littéraires et populaires/argotiques? éds. par Sabine Bastian, Uta Felten et Jean-Pierre Goudaillier Amanda Dalola Bastian, Sabine, Uta Felten, Jean-Pierre Goudaillier, éd. Culture et mots de la table: comment parle-t-on de la nourriture et de la cuisine en termes académiques, littéraires et populaires/argotiques?. Peter Lang, 2019. ISBN 978-3-631-78562-1. Pp. 312. This volume features a collection of papers from the Colloque international d'Argotologie de Leipzig 2017, which reflects the work of twenty-five scholars investigating the decadent art of talking about food in a variety of languages and cultural contexts. Divided into three sections, each one dedicated to a different analytical pursuit—comparing lexical differences between argotic and standard terms, examining crosslinguistic lexical equivalents, observing descriptions in literature/music—this work brings to light the multitude of stylistic and functional differences speakers and writers face when talking about food and the act of eating. The first section addresses stylistic gaps in popular vs. normative forms of reference. Some chapters address stylistic differences in Hexagonal French: lexical creativity in vegan cuisine, popular food expressions from soldiers, food talk on French-language culinary blogs. Others explore socially-conditioned variation in other language varieties: Polish, Bulgarian, the regional languages of Champagne and Ardennes. The second section examines crosslinguistic lexical equivalents between French and other languages (Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Spanish) and examines the role that borrowing has played in the development of an international yet culturally-bound culinary lexicon, such as the presence of a large number of French words in gastronomical terminology in Spanish in contrast to the variable morphological productivity for different 'pork' words in Peninsular Spanish, with a culinary history that privileges ham as the ultimate pork product vs. Hexagonal French which privileges sausage. The third section espouses a more textual analytic approach as it undertakes a general discussion of edible representations (food as well as alcohol, drugs, poison, and locations of their consumption) in song lyrics, literary titles, and the written works of Bruant, Dante, Gide, Mabanckou, Mujila, and Proust. The collection's three-pronged approach marries the linguistic, the crosslinguistic, and the cultural. By thoroughly deconstructing gastronomical language, it allows synchronic descriptions of language behavior to [End Page 251] motivate and inform cultural representations of food practices from varying time periods in a sort of timeless feedback loop. This compilation is strong not only for its methodological hybridity but also for its linguistic diversity—22 of the 23 chapters have been written in French, one in Italian, and an expansive array of European languages are featured as the subject of inquiry alongside French. Literary, cultural, and linguistic scholars alike will delight in the contents of this volume. Each chapter, although cohesively organized by analytical objective, can easily be devoured on its own. Scholars of gastronomy and history will find extra appeal in the ethnography- and history-centered discussions, while socio- and diachronic linguists will revel in the systematic deconstructions of etymological, register- and gender-conditioned variants. As such, this compendium lends itself easily to modular consumption in reading groups and upper-level courses on (French) culture, literature and/or linguistics. Comprehensive, multimodal, plurilinguistic, this collection will enthrall readers with its cornucopia of insight on the most universal cultural practice of all. Amanda Dalola New Manchester High School (GA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

This study aimed to identify and to contrast differences in Javanese-Indonesian speech acts in the Yowis Ben The Series film. This study used a contrastive analysis study with a sociolinguistic approach, which in this context emphasizes the aspects of pronouns, personal titles, and language variations. The method used in this research was descriptive qualitative. The data in this study are speech acts in Javanese and Indonesian (translation) which are used as dialogues in the film. The data source in this study was taken from the Yowis Ben The Series film through the WeTV video streaming application. The results of this study indicated that there were differences usage of Javanese-Indonesian speech in aspects of pronouns, personal titles, and language variations. This difference was due to non-linguistic aspects, such as the speaker's background, age, position or degree of speech partners in society.
 Keywords: Speech Act, Contrastive Analysis, Sociolinguistic

Latinx perceptions of Spanish in Miami: Dialect variation, personality attributes and language use

Reviewed by: Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective ed. by Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin Sarah E. Blackwell Carvalho, Ana M., Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin, eds. Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2015. Pp. 258. 2015. ISBN 978-1-62616-170-2. Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective is a welcome volume comprising important contributions on Spanish subject pronoun expression (SPE) by scholars focusing on monolingual Spanish varieties (part 1), Spanish in contact with other languages (part 2), and Spanish in contexts of acquisition (part 3). Each part contains four chapters, and all of them present quantitative analyses of SPE. In the preface, Ricardo Otheguy sketches the ground-laying work of early variationist sociolinguists, which sets the stage for quantitative-variationist studies of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) by Spanish pronombristas. In their “Introduction,” the editors identify questions addressed in the volume, including whether or not SPE is consistent across language varieties or susceptible to contact-induced change, and how it develops during language acquisition. These questions provide a unifying theme for the subsequent chapters. In chapter 1, Alfaraz analyzes Santo Domingo Spanish to determine whether its higher pronominal expression rate indicates a change in progress toward obligatory SPE in Dominican Spanish. She finds that variables conditioning SPE in other Spanish varieties (e.g., switch reference, singular verbs) also condition SPE in Dominican Spanish, but that second person singular references most strongly favor overt tú expression. Additionally, gender affects SPE, with Santo Domingo women favoring overt pronouns only slightly more than men. Nevertheless, overall SPP rates are similar to those of other Caribbean varieties, suggesting that Dominican Spanish is not unique in this regard. [End Page 486] In chapter 2, Orozco analyzes a corpus of Colombian Costeño (Barranquilla) Spanish and reports SPE rates comparable to those of other Caribbean varieties. Priming and tense/mood/aspect (TMA) effects on Costeño SPE also reflect results from earlier studies. The imperfect indicative most clearly favors SPE in Costeño, thus supporting the hypothesis that morphologically ambiguous verb paradigms promote more pronoun expression. Additionally, while perception verbs most strongly favor overt SPPs in Costeño, among mental activity verbs, only creer and saber favor expression. These findings suggest the need for further research on the effects of verb semantics on SPE. Lastra and Martín Butragueño (chapter 3) investigate SPE in Mexico City (MC) Spanish and report a low rate of overt SPPs in their MC corpus, a finding consistent with other “mainland” Spanish varieties. Grammatical person and number emerged as the strongest constraint on SPE in MC Spanish, which is also congruent with results form earlier studies. Textual genre has significant effects on subject expression (e.g., argumentation favors subject expression most strongly in the MC data). Interestingly, younger MC speakers use fewer overt subjects than older speakers, which contrasts with the direction of change evidenced in other Romance languages, suggesting a need for more research on age effects. Posio examines a corpus of conversational Peninsular Spanish in chapter 4, hypothesizing that frequently occurring verb forms, with or without SPPs, tend to appear in formulaic sequences having discourse-pragmatic functions with recognizable SPP expression or omission. For instance, the parenthetical epistemic downtoner no sé nearly always occurs with a null subject, while creo, when used to present opinions, has the highest SPP expression rate of the verbs Posio analyzes. Posio’s analysis of the discourse-pragmatic functions of frequent verb forms suggests that such forms may amplify (and possibly skew) the effects of constraints on SPE. Furthermore, his observation that constructions like ¿sabes? and ya sabes have low overt SPP rates in Peninsular Spanish, while formulaic tú sabes is quite frequent in Latin American varieties, highlights the need for future cross-dialectal studies of SPE in formulaic sequences to determine their contribution to dialectal differences in SPP usage. Part 2 begins with Torres Cacoullos and Travis’s chapter in which they compare the effects of cognition verbs, subject continuity, and priming on Spanish yo and English I expression in Colombian Spanish and American English. They show that first person singular expression in...

In contrast to mainstream politeness theory, this chapter outlines a sociopragmatic model that allows for different varieties and elaborations of politeness theory to be integrated with theories of social identity. The model is illustrated with sequences of data from face-to-face interaction taking place among native speakers of Spanish. M. Albelda Marco has noticed that in her data of spontaneous dialogue in Peninsular Spanish, the ratio of face-enhancing acts to face-threatening acts is approximately three to one. The chapter aims to illustrate how the mechanisms and processes theoretically accounted for in the model become actualized in spontaneous face-to-face dialogue carried out in different varieties of the Spanish language, with different varieties of Hispanic sociocultural imprinting. Co-constitution should be seen as operative not only with regard to system-linguistic and pragmatic aspects of discourse, but also with regard to sociopragmatic phenomena such as politeness and the management of interpersonal relationships.

The formulation of requests has been widely studied in pragmatics, both within a (variety of) language and from a contrastive perspective. In this study, we will show the specific role of alerters (elements that precede the request head act and that serve to get the attention of the hearer on the request) in request formulation, comparing L1 speakers of Spanish and L2 speakers of Spanish with L1 French in Discourse Completion Tests and Naturalised Interactions. In doing so, we contribute to the contrastive pragmatic study of both languages. Our data reveal that there are statistically significant differences in the use of alerters from Spanish L1 and L2 speakers in the DCTs but not in the Naturalised Interactions. Alerters occur with rather similar frequencies in both groups, but there are qualitative differences as to which forms are adopted. At the methodological level, we highlight that data obtained from both groups’ DCTs vs. Naturalised Interactions show different results, thus underlining the importance of combined methods for contrastive pragmatics research.

Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain)

The aim of this study was to investigate the types of request strategies employed by Yemeni and Malay secondary school students in English language. It also aimed at investigating the influence of social power and social distance on the students’ choice of request strategies. The data was collected through a discourse completion test (DCT) and the analysis used both Blum-Kulk’s et al. (1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP), and Scollon and Scollon’s (1995) politeness system. The findings of the study showed that both groups often use non-conventionally indirect request strategies by means of query preparatory. The analysis revealed that both groups do not take into consideration the social power and the social distance between the interlocutors because they always use the same strategies with any person. The students have this sociopragmatic knowledge in their mother tongue; however, both groups are not sensitive to the social power and social distance existing between the interlocutors as they lack the sociopragmatic knowledge in the target language. Moreover, the students almost use the same strategies even though they have different cultural backgrounds, and this might be attributed to their assimilation in the school learning environment which is a positive indicator for conductive learning environment.

This study explored the English request strategies and modifiers used by Malaysian and Saudi undergraduates. It also investigated the influence of social power and social distance on their choice of those strategies. Fifty Malaysian ESL and fifty Saudi EFL undergraduates participated in it. A discourse completion task was used to collect the data. Blum-Kulka et al.'s (1989) taxonomy was used to analyse request strategies and Martinez-Flor and Uso-Juan’s (2006) taxonomy was used to analyse request modifiers. Data was collected and analyzed quantitatively. The findings revealed that pragmatic competence varied according to context. Malaysian students in an English as a second language environment used more Conventionally Indirect request strategies than Saudi students did in an English as a foreign language environment. Non-Conventionally Indirect strategies were not used by Malaysians and were employed least often by Saudis. Social status and social distance had no significant influence on their use of request strategies. The study concluded by providing implications for English teachers to foster pragmatic competence among undergraduate students.