Iberian Spanish Research Articles

A syntactic approach to the morpho-semantic variation of -ear

This paper deals with the morpho-syntactic properties of Spanish verbs formed by -ear affixation (EAV henceforth). These include deadjectival (e.g. amarillear ‘to go yellow’), denominal (e.g. fanfarronear ‘to behave like a boaster’), and deverbal verbs (e.g. bailotear ‘to dance in an irregular manner’), which do not form a natural semantic class. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a unified morpho-syntactic analysis of EAV within Hale and Keyser's (1993) approach to argument structure – as developed in Mateu (2002) and Acedo-Matellán and Mateu (2011, 2013) – and Distributed Morphology; second, to take this proposal as a basis to account for cross-dialectal variation in the productivity of EAV. We group EAV into three basic syntactic classes that share a core structure v+P. We argue that a large subset of unergative verbs must be analyzed as events with a specifier that select for a relational/predicative complement, a type of structure that is shown to underlie verbs with an adverbial argument. -Ear is further checked against unmarked -ar, the default verb-forming suffix in Iberian Spanish. We show that an underspecified analysis of EAV is compatible with cross-dialectal variation in that it accommodates the (non-)predictable range of meanings found across American varieties where -ear has become the default verbalizer.

A Certain Future: Epistemicity, Prediction, and Assertion in Iberian Spanish Future Expression

Abstract The choice of future construction in Romance languages with variable expression is complex, and several factors have been shown or hypothesized to influence this choice (e.g. Aaron 2006, 2010 and Poplack & Malvar 2007). One factor stands out time and time again, though scholars do not always associate it with the same form: certainty. Using corpus-based quantitative methods, the role of certainty in Iberian Spanish future form variation is examined. The semantics of futurity and epistemic modality are discussed, with particular reference to the Spanish synthetic, or morphological, future. Then, the onset of non-future-reference use of the Synthetic Future as an epistemic marker is described, and viewed in light of the role of epistemicity in the possible strengthening of the semantics of “certainty” with the Spanish Periphrastic Future. Finally, diachronic evidence from distributional patterns in grammatical person, verb class and clause type is presented, which suggests that speakers associate the periphrastic construction with “certainty” and, increasingly, the synthetic construction with “uncertainty.” It is suggested that functional competition with innovative forms can breathe new life into older forms, sparking further grammaticalization.

Stress- and speech rate-induced vowel quality variation in Catalan and Spanish

This paper examines the effects of lexical stress and speech rate on vowel quality and duration in Central Catalan and Iberian Spanish and compares the patterns of phonetic variation caused by these two factors. For Catalan, with phonological vowel reduction, both absence of stress and fast speech rate result in vowel centralization and shorter durations, consistent with findings reported for other languages. For Spanish, the effects of speech rate are in line with those found for Catalan. Vowel quality is also sensitive to the absence of lexical stress in this language without phonological vowel reduction, however, not in a homogeneous and consistent way across speakers. The important individual variation observed suggests that the effect of stress on vowel quality is not conventionalized in Spanish. In addition, the durational difference between stressed and unstressed vowels is smaller in Spanish than in Catalan and less stable. This paper contributes data from two closely-related Western Romance languages (with important phonological differences) to a body of cross-linguistic research dealing with the influence of prosodic factors at the segmental level.

Intonational transfers in second language English speakers

Previous research on Spanish imperatives has demonstrated that their phonetic characteristics may not differ from those of declaratives. However, under the right conditions, imperatives can be produced with up-stepped patterns where nuclear pitch-accents show higher F0 values than pre-nuclear ones. These circumflex configurations are never attested in declaratives (Robles-Puente, 2011). The current study concentrates on the imperatives and declaratives produced by 31 Mexican Spanish/English bilinguals and reveals that this variety of Spanish, unlike Iberian Spanish and English, allows not only imperatives but also declaratives to be produced without the aforesaid intonational constraint. Additionally, the English productions of the same speakers show circumflex configurations indicating a clear prosodic transfer characteristic of their mother tongue. Robles-Puente, Sergio. 2011, “Looking for the Spanish imperative intonation,” in Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, edited by S. Alvord, pp. 153–164. Somerville, MA: CPP.

Content validity of the Spanish version of the Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index

ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to evaluate the content validity of the Iberian Spanish version of the questionnaire The Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI) by using the Content Validity Indexing (CVI). MethodsA descriptive cross-sectional observational study was conducted. The Spanish version of the questionnaire was translated from the American English instrument through forward and back translation processes. Experts evaluated the translated items through content validity indexing. Once the assessments were completed, CVI indicators were calculated: number of agreements, item Content Validity Index and overall content validity and modified kappa coefficient of the instrument. ResultsThe overall content validity of the instrument was 0.82. The average modified kappa coefficient of the items was 0.80, with a rating of ‘excellent’. Only 4 of the items were rated as weak or poor. ConclusionsThe study demonstrates that the content validity of the Spanish version of the PES-NWI is acceptable. Some results indicate that some items have cross-cultural applicability challenges that need to be addressed in future research studies. Use of the instrument in other Spanish language speaking countries should be taken with caution since some words may not reflect the language of the healthcare systems there.

Traducción intercultural de lenguajes especializados: el caso del lenguaje enológico

THE INTERCULTURAL TRANSLATION OF SPECIALIZED LANGUAGES: THE CASE OF THE ENOLOGICAL DOMAIN
 This paper focuses on the analysis of the specialized wine tasting language which is currently emerging in Polish in a process that incorporates translations of wine tasting notes from other languages, including Iberian Spanish. The generally unconstrained linguistic attitude of Polish wine critics leads to an easy adoption in their texts of neologisms and foreign syntactic and semantic borrowings. Seemingly untranslatable cultural constructs in the source text are identified as culturemes and need to be applied specific translational techniques to be suitably captured for the target text.

Temporal constraints in the use of demonstratives in Iberian Spanish

<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: PMingLiU; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: DE; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">Natural linguistic data show that a close relationship exists among demonstratives and time in Spanish. Such connection appears to be of a pragmatic nature whereby linguistic expressions that encode or denote time license the use of demonstratives under certain conditions.The aforementioned connection time-demonstration occurs when speakers employ demonstratives to refer to objects within the textual world (i.e. discourse referents). In this paper I explore the temporal constraints that impose restrictions in the use of demonstratives in Spanish and argue in favor of characterizing the relationship time-demonstration as a discourse deixis phenomenon in close connection with time deixis. The co-referential link that gets established between the distal demonstrative and the temporal expression is formalized and a presuppositional characterization provided for the three demonstratives in their discourse-deictic use.</span>

Dialectal Differences in Spanish Voiced Obstruent Allophony: Costa Rican versus Iberian Spanish

The Spanish voiced obstruents /b d g/ are traditionally described as having each two allophones: stop and fricative (approximant) in complementary distribution. Several researchers have noted that some Central American and Highland Colombian varieties deviate from the general allophonic distribution in showing a preference for stop realizations in all contexts, except for the intervocalic position. In this paper we report on a large-scale acoustic investigation of /b d g/ in postconsonantal (after a liquid, sibilant or glide) and postvocalic (after /a/) contexts in Costa Rica Spanish, establishing a comparison with the variety of Madrid, Spain, which we take as representative of a variety with the general pattern of allophony. Our study, based on a continuous measurement of intensity, confirms previous descriptions in that Costa Rica Spanish does indeed show a different pattern of allophony from that found in the Madrid variety. The analysis shows that in Costa Rica Spanish postconsonantal realizations of /b/ and /d/ are very different from postvocalic ones, with a clear separation in the degree of constriction between these two contexts. In Madrid, on the other hand, we find a continuum of constriction degrees, depending on the nature of the specific preceding segment, and without a clear separation between postvocalic and postconsonantal realizations. The question that naturally arises is that of the historical connection between these two patterns of allophony, for which we offer some speculation, based in historical parallels and comparison with other varieties.

Native dialect influences second-language vowel perception: Peruvian versus Iberian Spanish learners of Dutch

Peruvian Spanish (PS) and Iberian Spanish (IS) learners were tested on their ability to categorically discriminate and identify Dutch vowels. It was predicted that the acoustic differences between the vowel productions of the two dialects, which compare differently to Dutch vowels, would manifest in differential L2 perception for listeners of these two dialects. The results show that although PS learners had higher general L2 proficiency, IS learners were more accurate at discriminating all five contrasts and at identifying six of the L2 Dutch vowels. These findings confirm that acoustic differences in native vowel production lead to differential L2 vowel perception.

Aspects of quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish

The apparent optionality of the complementizer masks an important semantic difference between the (a) and (b) cases. Consider (1): as a typical declarative sentence, (4a) constitutes an assertion, whose propositional content is that a given soccer team (Barcelona) has won the Champions League. When compared with (1a), (1b) contributes the additional meaning that someone else (who is not the speaker) said (1a), such that the (speaker’s) utterance of (1b) constitutes a report of what has been said. (1b) is thus reported speech (Coulmas 1986), unlike (1a), which is an ordinary assertion. The two sentences would be produced in quite different settings: (1a) could be uttered for instance by a person who has been to the finals match, with the purpose of spreading the news. In such a setting, (1b) would be definitely odd. (1b), on the other hand, would be appropriate if I were listening to the radio and

Context-specific acoustic differences between Peruvian and Iberian Spanish vowels

This paper examines four acoustic properties (duration F0, F1, and F2) of the monophthongal vowels of Iberian Spanish (IS) from Madrid and Peruvian Spanish (PS) from Lima in various consonantal contexts (/s/, /f/, /t/, /p/, and /k/) and in various phrasal contexts (in isolated words and sentence-internally). Acoustic measurements on 39 speakers, balanced by dialect and gender, can be generalized to the following differences between the two dialects. The vowel /a/ has a lower first formant in PS than in IS by 6.3%. The vowels /e/ and /o/ have more peripheral second-formant (F2) values in PS than in IS by about 4%. The consonant /s/ causes more centralization of the F2 of neighboring vowels in IS than in PS. No dialectal differences are found for the effect of phrasal context. Next to the between-dialect differences in the vowels, the present study finds that /s/ has a higher spectral center of gravity in PS than in IS by about 10%, that PS speakers speak slower than IS speakers by about 9%, and that Spanish-speaking women speak slower than Spanish-speaking men by about 5% (irrespective of dialect).

Non‐native and second language perception of Spanish vowels by Californian English listeners.

The present study investigates multiple category assimilation in Californian English listeners’ cross‐language and L2 perception of Spanish vowels, as produced in Lima and Madrid. In labeling and XAB tasks, monolingual California English listeners as well as beginning and advanced learners of Spanish classified 100 Peruvian and 100 Iberian Spanish tokens in terms of 10 native English vowel categories by choosing from English words containing the vowels. Learners of Spanish also identified the Spanish tokens by choosing from the five Spanish vowels. The stimuli were isolated vowels extracted from nonwords produced by 10 female and 10 male monolingual speakers of Spanish from Lima and Madrid. The vowels were produced in the /fVfe/ context and were embedded in a carrier phrase. The results show that Californian English listeners perceived Spanish vowels from both varieties as more than one native vowel category and that this use of extra L1 categories in L2 perception decreased with experience with Spanish. Furthermore, greater multiple category assimilation to native English categories correlated with lower correct identification of the same vowels in the Spanish task. Therefore, multiple category assimilation may be the cause of the problems that Californian English learners have when perceiving Spanish vowels.

La recategorización del adverbio medio en español

According to traditional descriptive grammars, Spanish medio (‘half’) is a variable category. It can be a noun (medio de vida), a numeral adjective (quantifier) (media docena), or an unstressed adverb (estaba medio cansado). However, medio takes an invariable form as an adverb in standard Spanish (estaba medio cansada). Making the adverb medio agree with the adjective it modifies (estaba *media cansada) is considered nonstandard. Numerous cases are attested where the adverb medio agrees, as though it were an adjective, with the noun or the adjective which it modifies. This process, known as ‘recategorization’ implies that an element is interpreted as belonging to one category (i.e. adjective) in some varieties and as part of another (here, adverb) in other varieties. The ‘adjectivization’ of medio is widely considered to be characteristic of Latin American Spanish varieties, but it is believed to be rare in Iberian Spanish. In this study I use unpublished dialect data from the ALPI (Atlas Linguistico de la Peninsula Iberica) to examine the precise geographical area of the phenomenon in Peninsular Spanish. These data clearly show that the distribution of this phenomenon is much wider than previously claimed, since it is attested not only in the Galician area but also in Leonese and in Andalusian, the latter being the probable source for the transfer of the phenomenon to Latin American Spanish. We also use historical and contemporary data from both Peninsular and Latin American texts (Corpus del espanol) to analyse some specific cases of adverbial medio with and without agreement (medio/media tonta), and to study the semantic interpretations associated with each variant.

Iberian Spanish “macho”: vantages and polysemy in culturally defined meaning

This study explores some specific aspects of compatibility between cognitive models. Robert E. MacLaury’s theory of vantages as arrangements of coordinates and Lakoff’s concept of radial categories are mutually reinforcing to an analysis of semantic polysemy. Vantage Theory (VT) includes the notions of zooming in and zooming out, allowing focused and broad points of view to be constructed in reference to a figure and ground. Zooming in and out are some of the mechanisms of Lakoff’s increments of polysemous extension. Also helpful is Langacker’s usage-based model of a hierarchical semantic network. Expanding the VT model in this way enables interpretation of a complex lexical meaning as multiple perspectives on one concept, the Iberian macho. In addition to polysemy, we will look at the relation between vantages and prototypes and consider the contribution of one’s personal background and viewpoint to semantic networks.

Comment on “Formation of chenier plain of the Doñana marshland (SW Spain): Observations and geomorphic model” by A. Rodríguez-Ramírez, C.M. Yáñez-Camacho [Marine Geology 254 (2008) 187–196

In this study the total radiocarbon dataset published by Rodríguez-Ramírez and Yáñez-Camacho [A. Rodríguez-Ramírez, C.M. Yáñez-Camacho, Formation of chenier plain of the Doñana marshland (SW Spain): Observations and geomorphic model, Marine Geology 254 (2008) 187–196.] has been re-calibrated using new regional reservoir corrections. It is very important to take into account these corrections, since all published works in the Atlantic Iberian Spanish coast from the year 1996 have an incorrect value of regional reservoir ( ΔR) and, therefore, all calibrated ages and obtained conclusions must be kept in quarantine, until new revision. The re-calibration that we have carried out demonstrates that the sandy and shelly ridges are 430 to 637 years older than what RR&YC calculated. These are considerable errors that hinder the establishment of the precise age of short-term events, such as those which seemed to generate the estuarine ridges. Another question rises from the apparent haste with which fluctuations of sea-level are established. Our general objections lead us to conclude that the evolutionary model stems from a preconceived idea of how the Guadalquivir's estuary Holocene filling should have been built.

Developing a test of prosodic ability for speakers of Iberian Spanish

In the absence of a Spanish prosody assessment procedure, an English one (Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Children: PEPS-C) has been adapted for use with Iberian Spanish speakers. The paper describes the scope, principles and methods of the test and the modifications other than lexical translation that were required to produce a Spanish procedure. Findings from the first studies of data collected using the Spanish test are briefly considered: these suggest crosslinguistic parallels and English/Spanish differences in adult prosodic ability. Lengthier consideration is given to prosodic data from Spanish children and the use of prefinal contrastive accent in the two languages. We conclude that the test is a feasible and valid instrument for assessing Spanish prosodic ability and indicate possible directions for further research.

Les Chemins de Rome: Les Visites ad Limina a l'Epoque Moderne dans l'Europe Meridionale et le Monde Hispano-Americain (XVIe-XIXe siecle) (review)

Les Chemins de Rome: Les Visites ad Limina a l'Epoque Moderne dans l'Europe Meridionale et le Monde Hispano-Americain (XVIe-XIXe siecle) (review)

Hitita <i>šakkar / zakkar</i> ‘excrementum’, <i>zama(n)kur</i> ‘barba’ y similares

This article deals with some hittite forms that show writing >z- s- z-<, intended as the actual representation of an affricate /tˢ-/, is due to the phonosymbolic value that this recent sound, of Proto- Anatolian date, can receive as sistematically opposed to the previously existent and isolated /s-/. Close parallels from Iberian languages, Basque and Spanish, are adduced.

A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish

This work presents a detailed description of modern Spanish, drawing on conversational and written examples taken from both the old and the new worlds. It takes into account the growing prestige of Latin-American Spanish as well as Iberian Spanish.