Corpus De Referencia Del Espanol Actual Research Articles

Is there justice in this world? A cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of the conceptualisation of ‘justice’

ABSTRACT The present article compares the conceptualisation of the Spanish term justicia and the Russian spravedlivost’ with the English justice to determine the contextual uses and specific cultural features of the concept. The data used in the study is taken from three online corpora – British National Corpus, Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), and Russian National Corpus. The investigation proposes the explications of the concept within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework as it offers an effective tool to decompose and specify the linguistic features reflected in the selected languages. The results of the study reveal the main differences and similarities between the three languages and, in sum, prove the relevance of culture-specific semantic analysis of abstract concepts and the use of NSM as a useful tool in cross-cultural studies.

El significado pragmático del marcador discursivo <i>(Ya) ves que</i>

El propósito de este artículo es caracterizar la expresión (Ya) ves que como marcador discursivo del español oral coloquial de México. Esta caracterización se basa principalmente en tres rasgos: fijación formal, pérdida de significado literal y significado pragmático o procedimental; se propone este último como argumento decisivo. Se analiza su significado pragmático o procedimental en términos de dos instrucciones que el oyente debe interpretar y que guían sus inferencias: actualización de información (una pieza informativa se recupera y se hace accesible al oyente) y anclaje discursivo (el contenido actualizado se marca como relevante para el discurso subsecuente). Los datos examinados proceden de los siguientes corpus orales del español: Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México (CSCM), Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) sección México y Corpus del Español (CE), así como de ejemplos de introspección. Se incluye también un apartado contrastivo para ilustrar los argumentos propuestos. La descripción del significado pragmático de (Ya) ves que contribuye a ampliar el repertorio de marcadores discursivos en el español mexicano.

Adverbs as evidentials: an English-Spanish contrastive analysis of twelve adverbs in spoken and newspaper discourse

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of six English evidential adverbs ending in -ly with their Spanish nearest translation equivalents, in spoken and newspaper discourse. The adverbs may be associated with varying degrees of reliability: high (clearly/claramente, evidently/evidentemente, obviously/obviamente), medium (apparently/al parecer) and low (seemingly/aparentemente, supposedly/supuestamente). The analysis is based on tokens of authentic language extracted from two contemporary corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). The qualitative analysis focuses on the evidential functions of the adverbs and on their pragmatic interactional uses; the quantitative analysis centres on the relative frequency of type of evidential functions and the clausal position of the adverbs. The results uncover a number of differences between the English adverbs and their Spanish correlates and also between the two discourse types. Practically all the adverbs are strongly specialized in expressing either indirect-inferential or indirect-reportative evidentiality. English obviously and Spanish evidentemente show a high frequency of cases of loss of evidential meaning due to pragmaticalization, specifically in spoken discourse. Regarding position, the English adverbs are more frequent in medial clausal position, while some Spanish adverbs are often found in the more prominent parenthetical position.

The Use of Anglicisms in Various Thematic Fields: An Analysis Based on the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual

This piece of research presents an analysis of the use of anglicisms in the Spanish press at the beginning of the 21st century. Specifically, it concentrates on their distribution in texts belonging to different thematic domains. Thus, the purpose of this study is to establish a ranking of specialised fields in terms of the frequency with which anglicisms are employed in them. In order to do so, the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), compiled by the Real Academia Española, is used as the source for texts, which supports the reliability and representativeness of the present work.

Variabilidad del discurso oral: el caso de seguramente. Un análisis comparativo con quizá(s) y a lo mejor

Variabilidad del discurso oral: el caso de seguramente.Un análisis comparativo con quizá(s) y a lo mejor

Contrastive Analysis of Stretched Collocations with <i>Get</i> and <i>Take</i>: Their use and Pedagogical Implications

Abstract: This paper explores the pedagogical implications of contrastive analyses of light verb constructions containing get and take in English and Spanish based on electronic corpora, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA). The main tenets of collocations from a contrastive perspective-and the points of contact and departure between both languages-are discussed prior to examining the commonest types of verb+ noun combinations (i.e., take a bath, take advantage of), verb+ adjective (i.e. get ready, get worse, get angry), verb+ participle (i.e., get married, get dressed) as significant cases of so-called light, empty, thin, or verbs. A quantitative and qualitative-oriented case study is accordingly conducted, determining the weight of get and take in stretched collocations in the BNC and of the Spanish equivalent verbs constructions within the CREA. Based on empirical data obtained this way, this paper provides relevant insights for more accurate translations, helping to enhance the collocational competence of L2 students, who tend to avoid constructions including empty verbs in favour of full verb forms. The findings in this study shed light on the potential of corpora resources for improving the collocational usage of foreign-language learners, as quantitative and qualitative comparisons of collocations serve to highlight the similarities and, more importantly, the lexical, cognitive and typological differences between these phraseological constructions in the two languages, thereby substantiating the very useful role that analysis may play for teaching in general and for collocational knowledge and proficiency in particular.Keywords: Collocations, Light Verb Constructions, Translation, Teaching PhraseologyIntroductionStretched Collocations at the Crossroads in English and Spanish PhraseologyPhraseology is definitely concerned with the study of those chunks which, be they collocations or idioms, constitute some crucial cognitive, textual and pragmatic tools to be mastered by the learner. As Sokolik (2001: 487) underlines in her overview of Computer- Assisted Language Learning (CALL), corpus linguistics and concordancing can help provide the data and tools that students and instructors need to make sense out of usage. CALL applications and phraseology may thus provide invaluable resources for the student's knowledge of multiword units such as delexicalized verb constructions. These semi-compositional verb-noun constructions have been investigated under various labels in the different linguistic traditions. Other terms that are in use to denominate such constructions, parts of them, or a superset of semi-compositional expressions which will be used in this study are light verbs, operator verbs, complex predicates, support verb constructions and others. There is no consensus among the authors about what structures are admissible and different studies investigate non-identical structures. Despite this proviso, in English linguistics, the common ground is that the structures should be non-compositional and consist of a semantically low-content, inflected verb and a predicate noun (Nickel, 1968; Wierzbicka, 1982).Prior to undertaking a detailed case study exploring this phenomenon and its implications for learning, some remarks will be made on CALL, phraseology and their interface.CALL and its Role in Improving L2 LearningCALL has become a new, but well-established, scholarly domain researching the pedagogical possibilities provided by computers and the Internet for increasing learners' communicative skills (Warschauer and Kern, 2000; Warschauer, 2001; Blake, 2001; Davies, 2002; Godwin-Jones, 2005; Oster et al., 2006). CALL may be broadly defined as any process in which a learner uses a computer and, as a result, improves his or her language (Beatty, 2003: 248). …

The Grammaticalization of the Spanish Complement-taking Verb without a Complementizer

This study examines authentic data samples taken from the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA) in order to uncover any semantic trends that can be commonly observed in verbs taking a sentential complement without the complementizer que in Spanish. In doing so, special attention is given to the grammaticalization process that can account for epistemic fragments in which the semantic meaning of the verb becomes attenuated and where the main verb alone without a complementizer functions like an adverbial phrase. Four semantic groups of verbs with a zero complementizer are analyzed: (i) Verbs of cognition/mental act (e.g., creer ‘think’); (ii) verbs of communication (e.g., decir ‘say’); (iii) verbs of volition and desire (e.g., esperar ‘hope’); and iv) verbs of emotion (e.g., temer ‘fear’). These verb groups allowing a zero complementizer show differences with respect to (i) the subjunctive and indicative use in the embedded clause, (ii) the formal Vs. informal registers and (iii) the use of the complement-taking verbs as a fragment/parenthetical or an epistemic marker (in order to capture the degree of grammaticalization). This study proposes that not all the verbs that allow for the omission of the complementizer undergo the same degree of grammaticalization, but the semantics of the main verb interacting with all those factors play a role in determining the likelihood of the omission and the possibility that the main verb can actually be used as a floated parenthetical with a more subjective meaning that involves a more active process of grammaticalization. It is also shown that the degree of grammaticalization differs from verb to verb, as well as from verb class to verb class.

Getting closer: Codification of subjective semantic prosody in Spanish continuative aspect

The syntactic correlates of the diachronic process of subjectification within grammatical constructions, unlike that of discourse markers and connectives, do not include a cancellation of syntax. This can make the identification of subjectification within some grammaticalization processes difficult to identify. Pairs of purportedly synonymous constructions, such as continuative aspectual markers in Spanish, offer an ideal site to explore how certain linguistic contexts, through frequency, can come to be associated with more or less subjectivity. Six forms are included in this study: the phasal adverbs aún ‘still’ and todavía ‘still’ and the “phasal periphrastic” (Laca 2000) constructions including (semi-)auxiliaries: seguir ‘follow’ + Vndo and continuar ‘continue’ for positive polarity, and the corresponding seguir sin ‘follow without’ + INF and continuar sin ‘continue without’ + INF for negative polarity. In a variationist study of 481 occurrences of these forms from 1760–1860 in Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and 2762 occurrences from 1975–1980 from Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), it is found that the difference between these “synonyms” is linked, on the one hand, to contextual elements indicative of subjectivity, and on the other, to register. Furthermore, it is suggested that variation due to differing levels of subjectivity and register variation may share some characteristic patterns in the distribution of grammatical features.

A corpus-based study of English approximate negators and their translations into Spanish

This paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of how English affixal negation is translated into Spanish and the extent to which the use and distribution of the translations differ from those in non-translated Spanish texts. Empirical data for the study are drawn from the ACTRES Parallel Corpus (P-ACTRES http://actres . unileon.es/) and from the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA). The cross-linguistic analysis reveals a fairly large and varied inventory of Spanish translation choices which are then compared with non-translated CREA data. The contrastive procedure includes a verification of target language fit which reveals that differences in translated and non-translated usage are statistically significant. These differences are interpreted qualitatively in terms of translation universals.

Modalidad apelativa y gramaticalización en el discurso: el caso de no me digas

Basándonos principalmente en los datos suministrados por el Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), se identifican y describen los usos discursivos que la forma apelativa no me digas presenta en la sincronía actual del español. El análisis de estos usos comunicativos pone de relieve que no me digas ha desarrollado diversos valores formulísticos que, no obstante, se pueden explicar desde las propiedades formales y semánticas originales de la expresión apelativa. Los diferentes grados de fijación e idiomaticidad que presentan estos valores formulísticos sugieren la existencia de varios grados de gramaticalización en el discurso, así como de un paso gradual en el “desplazamiento modal” o cambio por el que la modalidad expresada en el discurso acaba imponiéndose a la modalidad codificada. Como consecuencia de estos cambios, se ha producido una evolución desde la modalidad apelativa original a otros valores modales de carácter expresivo, epistémico y asertivo, así como su transformación en diversos marcadores discursivos de naturaleza modal.

Lexical Connection: Semiterm Grammatical Patterns in Spanish

The aim of this paper is to describe the grammatical patterns of a set of nouns frequently used in Spanish specialized discourse: the so-called semiterms. The following nouns were selected for the study: problema ‘problem’, resultado ‘result’, motivo ‘motive/reason’, razon ‘reason’, and consecuencia ‘consequence’. Apart from designating specialized concepts in different fields, they can be used to provide structure, introduce information into the text, and act as lexical connectors. The grammatical and lexicographical description of these semiterms is compared with the results provided by consulting the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA) database of the Real Academia Espanola in three thematic fields: Science and Technology, Economics and Finance, and Law. The results of the research highlight three specific patterns of use for the semiterms in specialized texts, placing particular emphasis on the constructions that contribute to the texture of discourse. It is proposed that these patterns should be incorporated into dictionaries of use (codifiers) as lexicographical data that may enrich the information given about these nouns, whose meanings are clearly diffuse.

Grammatical patterns in Spanish: verbs of existence and appearance

In this paper, 2 2 The research presented in this paper was carried out in the framework of the competitive national project ‘Las categorías de verbo y adverbio en el DAELE’ (reference HUM2006–06982), awarded by the Spanish Dirección General de Enseñanza Superior e Investigación Científica, and directed by Dr Paz Battaner Arias at the Pompeu Fabra University. I describe the grammatical patterns of a set of Spanish verbs that are frequently used in specialised discourse to provide structure, organise information in the text and function as connectors. The verbs selected for the study are the following unaccusative verbs of existence and appearance: ocurrir (‘occur’), suceder (‘happen/take place’), existir (‘exist’), aparecer (‘appear’) and resultar (‘turn out’). The grammatical and lexico-graphical description of these verbs is compared with the results provided by consulting the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) database of the Real Academia Española in three thematic fields: Science and Technology, Economics and Finance, and Law. The results of the research highlight three specific patterns of use for the unaccusative verbs of existence and appearance studied in specialised texts, placing particular emphasis on the constructions that contribute to the texture of discourse. I propose that these patterns should be incorporated into dictionaries of use (‘codifiers’) as lexicographical data that may enrich the information given about these words, whose meanings are clearly diffuse.

Grammatical patterns in Spanish: verbs of existence and appearance

In this paper,22 The research presented in this paper was carried out in the framework of the competitive national project ‘Las categorías de verbo y adverbio en el DAELE’ (reference HUM2006–06982), awarded by the Spanish Dirección General de Enseñanza Superior e Investigación Científica, and directed by Dr Paz Battaner Arias at the Pompeu Fabra University. I describe the grammatical patterns of a set of Spanish verbs that are frequently used in specialised discourse to provide structure, organise information in the text and function as connectors. The verbs selected for the study are the following unaccusative verbs of existence and appearance: ocurrir (‘occur’), suceder (‘happen/take place’), existir (‘exist’), aparecer (‘appear’) and resultar (‘turn out’). The grammatical and lexico-graphical description of these verbs is compared with the results provided by consulting the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) database of the Real Academia Española in three thematic fields: Science and Technology, Economics and Finance, and Law. The results of the research highlight three specific patterns of use for the unaccusative verbs of existence and appearance studied in specialised texts, placing particular emphasis on the constructions that contribute to the texture of discourse. I propose that these patterns should be incorporated into dictionaries of use (‘codifiers’) as lexicographical data that may enrich the information given about these words, whose meanings are clearly diffuse.

Oblique reflexives in Spanish: A constructional account of sí and sí mismo

Spanish reflexive forms in prepositional phrases often occur with the adjective mismo ‘self’ (e.g., para sí vs. para sí mismo ‘for himself’). This co-occurrence is at times optional, i.e., mismo functions as a reflexive intensifier as found in many other languages (König and Gast, Linguistic Typology 10: 223–276, 2006), and at times puzzlingly obligatory. This makes the collocations a complex phenomenon that has not yet been properly addressed in a comprehensive way. In this paper, I claim that the structures instantiate two independent pronominal constructions, which following the typology of reflexives in Haiman (Language 39: 781–819, 1983), I call the “light reflexive” [ prep sí] and the “heavy reflexive” [ prep sí mismo]. Basing my analysis on a study of 3,000 natural examples from the CREA (Corpus de referencia del español actual ‘Reference corpus of current Spanish’), I show that the two structures at times compete within the same grammatical frame, but most of the times, they mutually exclude each other: the light reflexive occurs mostly in frames bearing middle voice semantics, while the heavy reflexive serves as the most natural exponence of typical reflexive situations.

The family of object-related depictives in English and Spanish: towards a usage-based constructionist analysis

Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba cogitandi (e.g. “considerar”/“consider”, “encontrar”/“find”, etc.) in English and Spanish. Building on Gonzálvez-García [Gonzálvez-García, F., 2006a. Passives without Actives: Evidence from Verbless Complement Constructions in Spanish. Constructions SV1-5/2006; Gonzálvez-García, F., 2003. Reconstructing object complements in English and Spanish. In: Martínez Vázquez, M. (Eds.), Gramática de Construcciones (Contrastes entre el Inglés y el Español). Grupo de Gramática Contrastiva, Huelva, pp. 17–58], these configurations are argued to be constructions in their own right, viz. the subjective–transitive construction. The main focus of this paper is on the investigation of the most salient semantico-pragmatic hallmarks of four lower-level configurations of the subjective–transitive construction in the light of coercion [Michaelis, L.A., 2003a. Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In: Cuyckens, H., Dirven, R., Taylor, J., (Eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 163–209; Michaelis, L.A., 2003b. Headless constructions and coercion by construction. In: Francis, E., Michaelis, L.A., (Eds.), Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. CSLI, Stanford, pp. 259–310; Michaelis, L.A., 2004a. Type shifting in construction grammar: an integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15 (1), 1–67; Michaelis, L.A., 2004b. Why we believe that syntax is construction-based. Unpublished plenary delivered at the Third International Conference on Construction Grammar(s), Université de Provence, Marseille, July 9, 2004.] via (i) obligatory reflexive pronouns in the object slot, (ii) a progressive verb form with an inherently stative situation/state of affairs, (iii) an imperative verb with a prima facie non-controllable situation/state of affairs, and (iv) an imperfect tense with a counterfactual interpretation. It is shown that while the first three types of coercion are observable in both English and Spanish, type (iv) points to an interesting asymmetry between these two languages, thus lending further credence to the assumption that argument structure is construction-specific as well as language-specific. Moreover, it is demonstrated that these configurations can be aptly regarded as a family of constructions and that a non-monotonic, default inheritance system of the type invoked in the cognitively-influenced strand of Construction Grammar [Goldberg, A.E., 1995. Constructions. A Construction Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London; Goldberg, A.E., 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press, New York] can capture the commonalities and the idiosyncratic particulars of these conventional extensions in the construct-i-con.

Modifying nouns : an english-spanish corpus-based contrast of three word pairs

The modification of nouns is a problematic area in contrasting English and Spanish. The different typologies to which these two languages belong determine essential differences, such as the unmarked position of adjectives, before nouns in English and after nouns in Spanish. The aim of this study is to set up a list of the most common characterizing resources for nouns in both languages, and establish their different distribution, so that trends in usage can be detected. A number of concordances of three word pairs have been selected from two large monolingual corpora, Cobuild and CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual). The data have been analysed to describe the type of modifiers that occur in both languages. This contrastive analysis provides useful data in areas such as translation, foreign language learning and teaching, or descriptive linguistics. The translation process between English and Spanish is the main focus of this paper.