Spanish Phrases Research Articles

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

The interpretation of Spanish masculine plural NPs: Are they perceived as uniformly masculine or as a mixture of masculine and feminine?

AbstractThis article investigates whether human masculine plural noun phrases (NPs) in Spanish, which can be interpreted with an exclusively masculine or a mixed-gender meaning, are a case of balanced or unbalanced ambiguity. The results of an experiment using a sentence continuation task with oral stimuli are consistent with the claim that masculine grammatical gender biases listeners toward an exclusively masculine interpretation. The acceptance rate of continuations with the pronoun uno/una referring to a masculine plural antecedent showed that the exclusively masculine meaning of the NP is accessed more frequently and involves a lower cognitive cost than the mixed-gender interpretation. Further, this effect interacts with the stereotypicality of the noun: nouns independently established to carry a masculine stereotype are less likely to be associated with a mixed-gender interpretation. The study also found that the speakers’ attitudes toward nonsexist language predict their acceptance of the mixed-gender interpretation of masculine NPs.

Joaquín les gusta: On Gut-Level Love for a Lamb of the House

ABSTRACT Joaquín les gusta is the Spanish phrase that animates this article. It forms our entrance into human-animal relations in a small village in Galicia, in the north of Spain. Here, we explore a particular kind of love for animals that is condensed in the Spanish word gustar. The gut-level love implied stretches all the way from the attentive care for a beloved animal, to its slaughtering, its dedicated cooking, and the savouring of its meat during a festive meal. We did not borrow the term gustar from scholarly literature to take to our fieldsite, but worked the other way around and distilled it from our fieldwork. Our hope is that this term might help other scholars to ask if, in the sites and situations with which they are confronted, some form of gustar might also flow between animals and humans.

Preposition Stranding in Spanish–English Code-Switching

This study tests the acceptability of preposition stranding in the intrasentential code-switching of US heritage speakers of Spanish. Because languages vary when extracting determiner phrases from prepositional phrases, known as preposition stranding or p-stranding, a contrast arises for Spanish–English bilinguals. English allows p-stranding, but in Spanish the preposition is traditionally pied-piped with the DP. Heritage speakers of Spanish, though, have shown variability, with child sequential bilinguals requiring said pied-piping, but simultaneous bilinguals allowing p-stranding in Spanish. Participants (n = 24) completed a written acceptability judgment task with a 7-point Likert scale. The task included code-switched sentences (n = 16) with p-stranding, switching from either English to Spanish or vice versa, with comparison monolingual equivalents for Spanish (n = 8) and English (n = 8) included as well. The results found that the simultaneous bilinguals accepted p-stranding in both languages, while also showing no restriction in either code-switching condition. Child sequential bilinguals, however, showed the expected monolingual distinction between Spanish and English, and p-stranding was only accepted with Spanish determiner phrases extracted from an English prepositional phrase (i.e., Spanish-to-English). These findings support the previously reported differentiation between simultaneous and child sequential bilinguals regarding p-stranding, while expanding it to code-switching.

Variability of Syntactic Structures (based on attributive phrases in Spanish and Russian)

Variability of Syntactic Structures (based on attributive phrases in Spanish and Russian)

An mHealth Physical Activity Intervention for Latina Adolescents: Iterative Design of the Chicas Fuertes Study.

BackgroundOnly 3% of Latina teens meet the national physical activity (PA) guidelines, and these habits appear to persist into adulthood. Developing effective interventions to increase PA in Latina teens is necessary to prevent disease and reduce disparities. Mobile technologies may be especially appropriate for this population, but mobile health (mHealth) intervention content must be designed in collaboration with the target population. ObjectiveThis study aims to develop an mHealth PA intervention for Latina adolescents using a multistage iterative process based on the principles of human-centered design and multiple iterations of the design phase of the IDEAS (Integrate, Design, Assess, Share) framework. MethodsOn the basis of the feedback from a previous pilot study, the planned intervention included visual social media posts and text messaging, a commercial wearable tracker, and a primarily visual website. The development of the requested mHealth intervention components was accomplished through the following 2 phases: conducting focus groups with the target population and testing the usability of the final materials with a youth advisory board (YAB) comprising Latina adolescents. Participants for focus groups (N=50) were girls aged 13-18 years who could speak and read in English and who were recruited from local high schools and after-school programs serving a high proportion of Latinos. Facilitated discussions focused on experience with PA and social media apps and specific feedback on intervention material prototypes and possible names and logos. Viable products were designed based on their feedback and then tested for usability by the YAB. YAB members (n=4) were Latinas aged 13-18 years who were not regularly active and were recruited via word of mouth and selected through an application process.ResultsThe focus group discussions yielded the following findings: PA preferences included walking, running, and group fitness classes, whereas the least popular activities were running, swimming, and biking. Most participants (n=48, 96%) used some form of social media, with Instagram being the most favored. Participants preferred text messages to be sent no more than once per day, be personalized, and be positively worded. The focus group participants preferred an intervention directly targeting Latinas and social media posts that were brightly colored, included girls of all body types, and provided specific tips and information. Modified intervention materials were generally perceived favorably by the YAB members, who provided suggestions for further refinement, including the shortening of texts and the incorporation of some Spanish phrases. ConclusionsLatina teens were generally enthusiastic about an mHealth PA intervention, provided that the materials were targeted specifically to them and their preferences. Through multiple iterations of development and feedback from the target population, we gained insight into the needs of Latina teens and joined with industry partners to build a viable final product.

Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

A New Lexical Resource for Evaluating Polarity in Spanish Verbal Phrases

Nowadays, a very small number of lexical resources that can be employed in the particular task of determining polarity for Spanish verbal phrases exist in literature and linguistic resource databases. Therefore, it is needed to increase efforts towards the construction of this kind of lexical resources since they will have a very positive impact when creating computational modules for the automatic understanding of Spanish language. In this paper, we present a new manual annotated corpus for the news genre, made up of sentences contain ingeach a verbal phrase. The supervised corpus has been annotated with respect to polarity and the verbal phrase compositionality or non-compositionality, thus leading to have a very interesting lexical resource for identify ingpolarity in Spanish verbal phrases, so as to determine whether or not a given verbal phrase has a figurative or literal meaning. In addition, we present a lexicon of verbal phrases which indicates the estimate of it to be compositional.

A Translation Linguistic Setup-I AM in Spanish Language Context

The study aimed to provide selected syntax-functions of the phrase I AM in Spanish when using it in translation practices. It also deliveries teaching and learning insights that tap into the subject-matter-domain discussed. An oriented method based on collected and analyzed and added data was used to conduct the research study. The outcome showed that when translation is properly used in teaching and learning Spanish-syntax by taking as reference the translated phrase I AM in Spanish language context; this practice tents to foster cognitive skills and language competences among Spanish language learners up beginners level and benefit the learning process of the Spanish language grammar in this regard. It also revealed that the translation of this phrase can be used effectively in Spanish language contextual sentences and phrases. The present study is a gainful-approach for Spanish language bilingual Spanish/English teachers interested in applying translation-syntax-practices.

Towards ‘Another of Me’: Random Para Tolol :v and The Language Games

When social media experiences an escalation in the number of users until today, now social media offers an alternative for the community in constructing more intimate social relations. This is likened to a new world that Tom Boelstorff has tried to discuss in Second Life. Absolutely, here, the identity will find its intersection: could it reproduce? In some cases, that question turns the answer: yes. For example in a Facebook group called Random The Tolol: v (RPT: v). Not just building an image as a community that shares jokes as shown on its group’s timeline, there is a tendency to become when its members almost use Spanish phrases in each of their post captions frequently. What is interesting is that RPT: v is an Indonesian community. At the same time, to be honest, this language politics case also involved me who had long joined the RPT :v. Therefore, by using the method of digital ethnography research that has an autoetnographical character, I will try to explore more deeply what the meaning of language for members of RPT :v which simultaneously can (re)form their identity in the internet?

Plastic Poetry of the Page: Cecilia Vicuña’s Instan

This paper examines the poems of the contemporary Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña in her book Instan (2002) in order to show how they model visionary feminist and egalitarian social relationships. I demonstrate that her visual poems, which consist of letters or parts of words that she connects by drawn lines to form short words or phrases in English, Spanish, Latin and Quechua, invite the reader to follow the paths of the lines with his/her eyes and body in a kind of visual and kinetic consciousness and further to create their own connections between letters, words and phrases; their unusual poetic form emphasises a place between narrative, time and space. Poems that allow for such radical readerly involvement can be called, I suggest, plastic, that is, mouldable by the reader. This poetic space of between-ness both emerges from and transforms Vicuña’s biographical condition as an exile from Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship and as one alienated from the contemporary capitalist world. Vicuña both biographically and poetically inhabits a ‘non-place’ (a term used both by Marc Augé and Vicuña herself). Rather than seek to dissolve or overcome between-ness, she recreates it in her poems as a dynamic transformative position through constant change, crossing over, that is, translation, from language to language. This essay thus illuminates how Vicuña’s ‘non-place’, formed by translation on the page, is a highly energised and plastic field capable of ‘moulding’ new relationships for the exile and of imagining an egalitarian and feminist society.

Neología sintagmática anglicada en español: Calcos y préstamos

As results from studies carried out by the Antena Chilena de Neologia - Universidad de Concepcion suggest, lexical units from English are one of the prolific forms of innovation in Spanish, especially due to the linguistic and cultural influence of the United States. Neological word formations of this origin, such as loanwords and loan translations from English, and hybrid word formations are evident in Spanish. Previous research has proven that English loan words are significant today in lexical innovation in different varieties of Spanish (Goddard, 1980; Lorenzo 1996; Gimeno & Gimeno, 2003; Novotna, 2007); therefore, it was interesting to examine other types of Anglicized neological formations. This study focuses on the presence of Anglicized phrases in Spanish, i.e., loan translations from English and hybrid formations containing English loanwords. The sample was obtained from neological syntagmatic units formed either by English calque or hybrid formations consisting of a patrimonial word and an English loanword, collected from Chilean press between 2003 and 2014. The analysis was performed according to recurrence, grammatical configuration, and domains where these Anglicized neologisms were used. The results determined that loan translations were more frequent than hybrid formations, that the syntagmatic combinations consisted of a variety of grammatical structures, predominantly noun phrases, and that both types of neological units were overridingly used in specific domains.

Procesos de gramaticalización en la formación de locuciones preposicionales: en cabeza de y a la cabeza de

The paper is focused on the process that creates prepositional phrases in Spanish, from the perspective of the theory of grammaticalization and cognitivism, tracking semantic transformations through associative processes such as metaphor and metonymy. After reviewing these theoretical bases, the research follows two particular expressions in the Spanish prepositional phrases inventory: en cabeza de and a la cabeza de. The analysis starts by the study of the central noun, cabeza, in historic dictionaries, followed by a study of their use in the main academic corpus (CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI). The aim is to observe how these expressions have changed diachronically to establish when and how they have become fixed phrases in the Spanish language.

Privileging the Oriental in Paco Bezerra's El señor Ye ama los dragones

ABSTRACTPaco Bezerra's 2015 thriller-comedy El señor Ye ama los dragones destabilized the immigration narrative that often appears in Spanish theatre by creating a story in which Chinese immigrants are the focus, thus giving visibility and agency to a community that is little discussed in Spanish cultural production. Throughout his play, Bezerra inverts the common approach to immigration drama in which the Western is privileged in structure and in plot. Rather, in this play, the Oriental is privileged on a structural and narrative level, and the play concludes with the triumph of Xiaomei over her white Spanish counterparts. I propose that the Dantesque structuring of the play, the epistemological shift toward Chinese cultural norms, and the resolution of the play's mystery serve as a critique of the national narrative of multiculturalism and integration, which can be summed up in the common, yet ironic, Spanish phrase, “No somos racistas.”

Scope and partitivity of plural indefinite noun phrases in Spanish

Abstract It has been argued that European Spanish plural indefinite noun phrases including algunos convey a partitive effect because the restrictor alg- provides additional properties. The reason that algunos implicates a “non-all-things” effect is because it refers only to an indeterminate part of the whole. The scope of bare plurals and unos, in contrast, does not exhibit this characteristic. This article argues that, contrarily to this claim, the scope of bare plurals and unos also induces partitivity because occurrences of these words include unarticulated constituents. Therefore, European Spanish indefinite noun phrases pragmatically presuppose the relevant part of what the speaker intends to refer, which is also shared by the audience since it is part of the common ground both occupy. Hence, bare plurals and unos are always contextually restricted, since a covert (optional) variable present in the logical form cannot capture this contextual restriction.

The role of stress and word size in Spanish speech segmentation.

In English, the predominance of stressed syllables as word onsets aids lexical segmentation in degraded listening conditions. Yet it is unlikely that these findings would readily transfer to languages with differing rhythmic structure. In the current study, the authors seek to examine whether listeners exploit both common word size (syllable number) and stress cues to aid lexical segmentation in Spanish. Forty-seven Spanish-speaking listeners transcribed two-word Spanish phrases in noise. As predicted by the statistical probabilities of Spanish, error analysis revealed that listeners preferred two- and three-syllable words with penultimate stress in their attempts to parse the degraded speech signal. These findings provide insight into the importance of stress in tandem with word size in the segmentation of Spanish words and suggest testable hypotheses for cross-linguistic studies that examine the effects of degraded acoustic cues on lexical segmentation.

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging theAethiopicaacross the Channel

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

A method based on rules and machine learning for logic form identification in Spanish

AbstractLogic Forms (LF) are simple, first-order logic knowledge representations of natural language sentences. Each noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition and conjunction generates a predicate. LF systems usually identify the syntactic function by means of syntactic rules but this approach is difficult to apply to languages with a high syntax flexibility and ambiguity, for example, Spanish. In this study, we present a mixed method for the derivation of the LF of sentences in Spanish that allows the combination of hard-coded rules and a classifier inspired on semantic role labeling. Thus, the main novelty of our proposal is the way the classifier is applied to generate the predicates of the verbs, while rules are used to translate the rest of the predicates, which are more straightforward and unambiguous than the verbal ones. The proposed mixed system uses a supervised classifier to integrate syntactic and semantic information in order to help overcome the inherent ambiguity of Spanish syntax. This task is accomplished in a similar way to the semantic role labeling task. We use properties extracted from the AnCora-ES corpus in order to train a classifier. A rule-based system is used in order to obtain the LF from the rest of the phrase. The rules are obtained by exploring the syntactic tree of the phrase and encoding the syntactic production rules. The LF algorithm has been evaluated by using shallow parsing with some straightforward Spanish phrases. The verb argument labeling task achieves 84% precision and the proposed mixed LFi method surpasses 11% a system based only on rules.

Clasificación de los restos de la lengua guanche según su grado de integración en español

From the point of view of their major or minor degree of integration in the fonetic, grammatical and semantic spanish structures, words and phrases of the language spoken by the ancient population of Canary Island that survive in Canary Spanish can be classified in three different types: traditional borrowings, introduced by a popular way; terminological borrowings, introduced by learning one; and foreign words and phrases, that are simple citations introduced in Spanish by chroniclers and scholars.

The importance of being earnest

Mock Spanish is a register in which Spanish words or phrases are used in otherwise English language texts or utterances to evoke humor, often indexing an unflattering image of Spanish speakers. This paper examines the occurrence of Mock Spanish in mass media, of interest in part because its use there cannot be mitigated so much as is possible in private speech by factors such as the speaker’s or writer’s intentions or relationships with addressees. Participants in previous studies have cited these factors as potential attenuators of Mock Spanish’s offensiveness. Mass media is also of interest for its role in the reproduction of elite discourses. This paper’s objective is to further engage the question of Mock Spanish as a form of racist discourse, and to examine the implications for those who are users of Spanish as a second language or are in the business of training second language users of Spanish.