Spanish Variants Research Articles

Linguistic Variability across Four Generations of Basque Spanish Speakers

Abstract The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of the preverbal double negation construction (i.e., yo tampoco no voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’), traditionally cited as a regional characteristic of the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. An acceptability judgment task and a semi-structured interview were carried out among four different age groups. The results show that speakers of the two older generations tend to accept and produce the regional construction significantly more than speakers of the two younger generations, who favor the Standard Spanish variant (yo tampoco voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’). It is suggested that this trend is mainly due to the participants’ different language contact situations (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988) and levels of formal education. Since older speakers grew up in a situation of shift via interference and with lower levels of formal education, they prefer the preverbal double negation construction, which was already a norm in the regional Spanish. However, younger speakers grew up in a language maintenance situation and have relatively high formal education levels, factors that have conditioned dialectal leveling in this case.

On mid-Atlantic Spanish in literary translation

Abstract This article applies the mid-Atlantic English approach described by Michael Henry Heim (2014) to the context of Spanish in literary translation. After describing Heim’s approach, it seeks to establish common points between this approach and a mid-Atlantic variant of Spanish. This is followed by a discussion of the background and attitudes towards neutral Spanish, and the potential advantages of a mid-Atlantic variant for the translation of dialectal language. Finally, it proposes a list of features from different Spanish variants to create potential geographically neutral variants of Spanish, in line with Heim’s features for his regional mid-Atlantic English.

Dialect-specificity and learners’ L2 perceptual resilience after study abroad

Abstract The present study examined the perception of two regional variants of Spanish (theta /Ɵ/ and zheísmo/sheísmo [ʒ, ʃ]) by nonnative speakers of Spanish with and without study abroad experience. The study’s goals were to determine whether learners who study abroad accept regional variants more frequently than at-home learners, and whether this effect is limited to cues participants are exposed to while abroad. Participants were L1 English speakers asked to determine whether they considered real and nonce word pairs with matching and mismatching regional variants to be instances of the same word. The findings reveal higher acceptance rates of mismatching variants by L2 learners who had studied abroad than of classroom learners but results for specific location of study abroad that suggest learners likely build perceptual resilience while abroad that goes beyond the specific cues they are exposed to.

A Comprehensive Analysis of 21 Actionable Pharmacogenes in the Spanish Population: From Genetic Characterisation to Clinical Impact.

The implementation of pharmacogenetics (PGx) is a main milestones of precision medicine nowadays in order to achieve safer and more effective therapies. Nevertheless, the implementation of PGx diagnostics is extremely slow and unequal worldwide, in part due to a lack of ethnic PGx information. We analysed genetic data from 3006 Spanish individuals obtained by different high-throughput (HT) techniques. Allele frequencies were determined in our population for the main 21 actionable PGx genes associated with therapeutical changes. We found that 98% of the Spanish population harbours at least one allele associated with a therapeutical change and, thus, there would be a need for a therapeutical change in a mean of 3.31 of the 64 associated drugs. We also identified 326 putative deleterious variants that were not previously related with PGx in 18 out of the 21 main PGx genes evaluated and a total of 7122 putative deleterious variants for the 1045 PGx genes described. Additionally, we performed a comparison of the main HT diagnostic techniques, revealing that after whole genome sequencing, genotyping with the PGx HT array is the most suitable solution for PGx diagnostics. Finally, all this information was integrated in the Collaborative Spanish Variant Server to be available to and updated by the scientific community.

The "Small World of Words" free association norms for Rioplatense Spanish.

Large-scale word association datasets are both important tools used in psycholinguistics and used as models that capture meaning when considered as semantic networks. Here, we present word association norms for Rioplatense Spanish, a variant spoken in Argentina and Uruguay. The norms were derived through a large-scale crowd-sourced continued word association task in which participants give three associations to a list of cue words. Covering over 13,000 words and +3.6 M responses, it is currently the most extensive dataset available for Spanish. We compare the obtained dataset with previous studies in Dutch and English to investigate the role of grammatical gender and studies that used Iberian Spanish to test generalizability to other Spanish variants. Finally, we evaluated the validity of our data in word processing (lexical decision reaction times) and semantic (similarity judgment) tasks. Our results demonstrate that network measures such as in-degree provide a good prediction of lexical decision response times. Analyzing semantic similarity judgments showed that results replicate and extend previous findings demonstrating that semantic similarity derived using spreading activation or spectral methods outperform word embeddings trained on text corpora.

Spanish Corpora of tweets about COVID-19 vaccination for automatic stance detection

The paper presents new annotated corpora for performing stance detection on Spanish Twitter data, most notably Health-related tweets. The objectives of this research are threefold: (1) to develop a manually annotated benchmark corpus for emotion recognition taking into account different variants of Spanish in social posts; (2) to evaluate the efficiency of semi-supervised models for extending such corpus with unlabelled posts; and (3) to describe such short text corpora via specialised topic modelling.A corpus of 2,801 tweets about COVID-19 vaccination was annotated by three native speakers to be in favour (904), against (674) or neither (1,223) with a 0.725 Fleiss’ kappa score. Results show that the self-training method with SVM base estimator can alleviate annotation work while ensuring high model performance. The self-training model outperformed the other approaches and produced a corpus of 11,204 tweets with a macro averaged f1 score of 0.94. The combination of sentence-level deep learning embeddings and density-based clustering was applied to explore the contents of both corpora. Topic quality was measured in terms of the trustworthiness and the validation index.

A Unifying Enlightenment: Institutions of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain (1700–1808)

A Unifying Enlightenment: Institutions of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain (1700–1808)

Intervariant Linguistic Phenomena in Semantic “Baking” in National Variants of Spanish

The article deals with the issue of semantic discrepancies between the lexical units of the Spanish language national variants on the example of the semantic field “Bread and baking” lexemes. The relevance of the study is due to its focus on the needs of the current stage of development of comparative semantics, variantology and intervariant dialectology, which provide for the gradual coverage of all the supporting semantic fields of the language in the communicative-pragmatic aspect. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that through a comparative intervariant analysis of language units with the primary meaning of baking, the cultural specificity of the corresponding concepts in different Spanish-speaking countries and regions within the framework of a multinational language is revealed. Particular attention is paid to the semantic processes and linguistic phenomena underlying the intervariant discrepancies, their classification is proposed in relation to this area. The question is raised about the importance of extralinguistic factors in the formation of the alimentary thesaurus of a particular country and culture or sets of cultures in a certain territory. As a result of the study, it was proved that the vocabulary of the field “Baking” is a source of difficulties in intercultural communication, directly related to linguistic phenomena in the field of variantology and intervariant dialectology of the Spanish language.

Fichera, fichar y ficha: su paso de mexicanismos stricto sensu de ámbito objetivo a lato sensu por su difusión en otras variantes del español

The present article presents a lexicological analysis of the following words: fichera, fichar and ficha. On the one hand, by means of both an exhaustive documentation and dialectological terminology, we demonstrate that fichera and the words with which it is related morphologically and semantically begin as stricto sensu Mexicanisms of objective field to later become lato sensu, due to its diffusion in other variants of Spanish. On the other hand, the period in which the word was integrated into Mexican Spanish is proposed, as well as its first documentation. Subsequently, its diffusion in other varieties of Spanish is shown and the causes that motivated it are argued. Finally, we discuss the proposal made by other scholars of fichera to be part of Mexican thieves’ slang.

Sources of convergence in indigenous languages: Lexical variation in Yucatec Maya.

Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depend on language situation and may result from different sources, in particular processes of vertical and horizontal convergence. In the present study, we investigate lexical variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken in a situation of generalized bilingualism. This language situation lacks some crucial ingredients of vertical convergence: no variety of Yucatec Maya has the status of a standard variety: the language of administration and education is Spanish (diglossia-with-bilingualism). The present study finds evidence of convergence processes that can be exclusively attributed to horizontal convergence. The lexical distance between speakers decreases in and between urban centers, variants with a large distribution are more likely in areas with a maximum of interactions with other areas. Even Spanish variants are distributed in the sample with a pattern that reveals processes of horizontal convergence: their distribution is accounted for through an areal bias (widespread in areas with a stronger exposition to Spanish) rather by influences from the urban centers (as centers of administration/education) to the rural areas in their surroundings.

Nias the introductory particle for expressions of negation in three dialectal variants of Spanish

AbstractWhen looking at expressions of negation/rejection in Spanish, the conjunctionniis one of the most prolific words. However, the extent of locutions employingnihas not been widely analyzed. For this reason, we conducted a comparative descriptive examination of discourse markers of rejection and refusal for three different dialectal variants of Spanish: those of Spain, Colombia and Mexico. The participants completed a survey to evaluate their familiarity with some of these pragmatic expressions and to provide new ones. Results show that speakers of these dialectal variants all use the most common markers that start withni, but also other phrases not recorded in many of the available sources. This paper aims to broaden the horizon of work on phraseological units of negation, which are often difficult to gather and study in depth because of their dialectal variability, colloquial use, and, in some cases, short lifespan.

Multi-view informed attention-based model for Irony and Satire detection in Spanish variants

Making machines understand language and reasoning on it has been one of the most challenging problems addressed by Artificial Intelligent researchers. This challenge increases when figurative language is used for communicating complex meanings, intentions, emotions and attitudes in creative and funny ways. In fact, sentiment analysis approaches struggle when facing irony, satire and other figurative languages, particularly those where the explanation of a prediction might arguably be as necessary as the prediction itself. This paper describes a new model MvAttLSTM based on deep learning for irony and satire detection in tweets written in distinct Spanish variants. The proposed model is based on an attentive-LSTM informed with three additional views learned from distinct perspectives. We investigate two strategies to pass these views into MvAttLSTM. We perform an extensive evaluation on three corpora, one for irony detection and two for satire detection. Moreover, in order to study the robustness of our proposed model, we investigate its performance on humor recognition. Experiments confirm that the proposed views help our model to improve its performance. Moreover, they show that affective information benefits our model to detect irony and satire. In particular, a first analysis of the results highlights the discriminating power of emotional features obtained from SenticNet and SEL lexicon. Overall, our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance in irony and satire detection in Spanish variants and competitive results in humor recognition.

Overview of MeOffendEs at IberLEF 2021: Offensive Language Detection in Spanish Variants

We would like to thank CONACyT for partially supporting this work under grants CB-2015-01-257383 and the Thematic Networks program (Language Technologies Thematic Network). Hugo Jair Escalante is supported by CONACyT under project grant CONACYT CB-S-26314. This work is also partially supported by the grant P20 00956 (PAIDI 2020) from Andalusian Regional Government, a grant from European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), the LIVING-LANG project [RTI2018-094653-B-C21], and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (scholarship [FPI-PRE2019-089310]) from the Spanish Government.

Pre-service Teachers’ perceptions on instant messaging and orthographic competence


 
 
 This work examines the perception held by pre-service teachers of Spanish in Chile and Argentina of the digital written norm in IM, together with their opinion regarding the influence of textisms on secondary students’ acquisition of orthographic competence. The study uses a transactional approach based on surveys and uses and applies a descriptive non-experimental design. Results, when compared with studies for the European Spanish variant, showed that pre-service teachers in Chile and Argentina considered use of textisms as harmful to secondary students’ development of orthographic competence, despite their own frequent use of textisms. However, one of the main findings is a certain degree of tolerance of specific types of textisms in digital writing, as was a more integrative approach to those written variables on the part of participants in Argentina.
 
 

Chronicles of Spanish 2020: new challenges

This work is dedicated to such a significant cultural event for the Spanishspeaking world as the launch of the annual publication of the Chronicle of the Spanish,where the work of the Academy in the “era of coronavirus” is described, and the resultof which was the first volume of the chronicle published by ESPASA in November,2020. This chronicle describes the development of the Spanish language and showsThe Royal Spanish Academy activities mainly over the past year. It also includes themost actual and fundamental issues of Spanish studies at the present time, predictsvocabulary and grammar changes of different national Spanish variants, describesvarious initiatives and projects of the Academy.The new strategy for the Academy, which wants to demonstrate greatertransparency in its actions will be analyzed and the most interesting topics from thefirst edition of the chronicle will be observed.

Genome-wide association study of stage III/IV grade C periodontitis (former aggressive periodontitis) in a Spanish population.

To identify loci associated with stages III/IV, grade C periodontitis (PIII/IV-C) through a genome-wide association study (GWAS). 441 Caucasian Spanish PIII/IV-C cases from the SEPA Network of Research Clinics and 1141 controls from the Banco Nacional de ADN were genotyped with "Axiom Spain Biobank Array," which contains 757836 markers, including rare and low-frequency Spanish variants. The analysis of the individual association and subsequently the gene-level analysis with Sequence Kernel Association Test (SKAT) were carried out adjusting for age, sex and PC1 covariates. Pathway Analysis was additionally performed with Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) software on the top associated genes. In the individual analyses, no genome-wide significant signals were detected. However, 8 SNPs of 8 loci reached suggestive evidence of association with PIII/IV-C, including FAT3 rs35709256, CSNK1G2 rs4807188, MYH13 rs2074872, CNTN2 rs116611488, ANTXR1 rs4854545, 8p23.2 rs78672540, ANGPT1 rs13439823 and PLEC rs11993287 (p<5×10-6 ). SKAT analysis identified other interesting signals at CNTN2, FBXO44, AP1M2, RSPO4, KRI1, BPIFB1 and INMT, although their probability does not exceed the multiple-test correction. IPA indicated significant enrichment of pathways related to cAMP, IL-2, CD28, VDR/RXR and PI3K/Akt. CONCLUSIONS: GWAS found no SNPs significantly associated with PIII/IV-C.

Rapid screening for SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in clinical and environmental samples using nested RT-PCR assays targeting key mutations of the spike protein

New SARS-CoV-2 mutations are constantly emerging, raising concerns of increased transmissibility, virulence or escape from host immune response.We describe a nested RT-PCR assay (~1500 bps) to detect multiple nucleotide changes resulting in key spike protein mutations distinctive of the major known circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants, including the three Variants of Concern (VOCs) 20I/501Y.V1 (United Kingdom), 20H/501Y.V2 (South Africa), and 20 J/501Y.V3 (Brazil), as well as the 20E.EU1 variant (Spain), the CAL.20C recently identified in California, and the mink-associated variant (GR, lineage B.1.1.298). Prior to application to field samples, the discriminatory potential of this PCR assay was explored using GISAID and Nextclade. To extend variant detection to challenging matrices such as sewage, where the amplification of long fragments is problematic, two short nested RT-PCR assays (~300 bps) were also designed, targeting portions of the region spanned by the long nested assay.The three newly-designed assays were then tested on field samples, including 31 clinical samples (7 fully-sequenced swab samples, and 24 uncharacterized ones) and 34 urban wastewater samples, some of which collected in areas where circulation of VOCs had been reported.The long assay successfully amplified 29 of the 31 swabs (93%), allowing the correct identification of variants 20I/501Y.V1 and 20E.EU1 present in the panel of previously characterized samples. The Spanish variant was detected in 14/24 of the uncharacterized samples as well. The sequences obtained using the short assays were consistent with those obtained with the long assay. Mutations characteristic of VOCs (UK and Brazilian variant) and of other variant (Spanish) were detected in sewage samples. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence of the presence of sequences harboring key mutations of 20I/501Y.V1 and 20 J/501Y.V3 in urban wastewaters, highlighting the potential contribution of wastewater surveillance to explore SARS-CoV-2 diversity.The developed nested RT-PCR assays can be used as an initial rapid screening test to select clinical samples containing mutations of interest. This can speed up diagnosis and optimize resources since it allows full genome sequencing to be done only on clinically relevant specimens. The assays can be also employed for a rapid and cost-effective detection of VOCs or other variants in sewage for the purposes of wastewater-based epidemiology. The approach proposed here can be used to better understand SARS-CoV-2 variant diversity, geographic distribution and impact worldwide.

Linguistic Means of Homeland Characterization in M. A. Asturias’s Mister President

The present research is devoted to the concept ‘patria’ (homeland) analysis in the Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel El señor presidente (Mister President). The verbalizations of the studied concept in the novel are counted and their linguistic context is analysed. The totalitarian society described by the writer is not fully fictional. The dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, though unnamed in the novel, is depicted. The linguistic realization of the studied concept is based on two groups of antithesis. The perception of homeland by real patriots, who are now considered the traitors of their homeland, and that of the people, who conform to the current conditions, but it is obvious that they are the ones who are ready to betray. The second antithesis is the fear of the president and calling the president the honoured citizen, the father and the defender of the homeland. The analysis of the linguistic means used to verbalize the concept ‘homeland’ in the studied novel shows that the said concept can be used by a totalitarian society as a tool of manipulation. Further analysis of the concept ‘homeland’ in other literary works by the authors writing in Spanish and belonging to different Hispanic countries will reveal the linguistic differences of the national variants of Spanish.

Demonyms in the Pacific Alliance countries: morphological and semantic variation

The existing research on onomastics does not sufficiently reflect upon the relation between cultural codes and demonyms, having in mind that demonyms universally represent linguistic devices for expressing territorial and regional identity. The article focuses on the complex polyparadigmal analysis of the system of demonyms related to the macrotoponymy of the four founding countries of the Pacific Alliance: Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Each of the four founding countries of the Pacific Alliance is characterised by the uniqueness of its culture, historical development, the specifics of the national variant of Spanish that reflects the indigenous influence of substrates and the collective values of the society. The research tasks of the article consist in systemising the morphological devices and the cultural layers of demonyms connected with the administrative division of given countries, detecting the variation parameters, comparing them from the linguacultural point of view. The main material of the research have been 100 official demonyms of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, and 31 variative denominations. The materials for the research are based on the official websites of the administrative units of the four countries, dictionaries data, diverse types of texts and discourse, as well as the notes of the informants speech. The research uses such methods as the continuous sampling method based on Internet sources, the analysis of dictionary definitions, the method of semantic interpretation, the morphological analysis, combined with interviews with informants whose interaction is made possible by the complex polyparadigmal analysis of the material. The authors have determined a series of lexemes that function as demonyms, analysed their form and content from the linguistic point of view. It has been revealed that the main tendency in the formation of suppletive demonyms for macrotoponyms are the terrain features and the assessment of ethnic background or mentality. The analysed demonyms manifest the relations of intralingual, intervariant homonymy, as well as hypo-hyperonymic relations. The complex analysis of the material has provided an opportunity to represent the demonym systems of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru as multidimensional and at the same time inherent to the unified functional continuum of entity in Spanish-speaking countries. The research results have led to the conclusion that demonyms act as independent notions and generators of new meanings and allusions. It is recommended to use transliteration when translating suppletive demonyms, while their decoding amplifies the linguacultural competence of Spanish-language students and harmonises the intercultural dialogue with the native speakers of Chilean, Colombian, Mexican and Peruvian national variants of Spanish in the areas of education and business.

Comparing Deep-Learning Architectures and Traditional Machine-Learning Approaches for Satire Identification in Spanish Tweets

Automatic satire identification can help to identify texts in which the intended meaning differs from the literal meaning, improving tasks such as sentiment analysis, fake news detection or natural-language user interfaces. Typically, satire identification is performed by training a supervised classifier for finding linguistic clues that can determine whether a text is satirical or not. For this, the state-of-the-art relies on neural networks fed with word embeddings that are capable of learning interesting characteristics regarding the way humans communicate. However, as far as our knowledge goes, there are no comprehensive studies that evaluate these techniques in Spanish in the satire identification domain. Consequently, in this work we evaluate several deep-learning architectures with Spanish pre-trained word-embeddings and compare the results with strong baselines based on term-counting features. This evaluation is performed with two datasets that contain satirical and non-satirical tweets written in two Spanish variants: European Spanish and Mexican Spanish. Our experimentation revealed that term-counting features achieved similar results to deep-learning approaches based on word-embeddings, both outperforming previous results based on linguistic features. Our results suggest that term-counting features and traditional machine learning models provide competitive results regarding automatic satire identification, slightly outperforming state-of-the-art models.