Spanish Words Research Articles

When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks principle in colexification

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and often systematic. For instance, the Spanish word dedo can refer to a toe or a finger, that is, these two meanings colexify in Spanish; and they do so as well in over one hundred other languages. Previous work shows that related meanings are more likely to colexify. This is attributed to cognitive pressure towards simplicity in language, as it makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and the competing pressure for languages to support accurate information transfer. We hypothesize that colexification follows a Goldilocks principle that balances the two pressures: meanings are more likely to attach to the same word when they are related to an optimal degree—neither too much, nor too little. We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal forces shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures.

Nativized Hispanic Borrowed Words in Cebuano Visayan Editorial “Masanta Nang Badlungon”: A Lexical Analysis

This linguistic study descriptively analyzes the nativized Hispanic borrowed words in Cebuano Visayan. A lexical analysis of the morphemic structures of words is undertaken in order to investigate the language nativization. The textual source of the analysis is the editorial from Superbalita-Cebu with the title: “Masanta nang Badlungon”. The words are examined as to lexical categories, English equivalents, root words, Spanish equivalents, and nativization. After an in-depth lexical analysis of the morphemic structures of words from the textuality as supported by the theory of phylogenetic change through linguistic borrowing, the following are the findings: (1) The Hispanic borrowed words in the Cebuano Visayan editorial are twelve nouns, three verbs, and three adjectives. (2) All twelve nouns borrowed from Spanish exemplify linguistic acculturation through lexical nativization. (3) The three verbs borrowed from Spanish words reveal nativized spellings and all are added with nativized affixes. (4) The three adjectives borrowed from Spanish change their orthography and native Cebuano Visayan affixes are added. Moreover, based on the findings, it concludes that Hispanic words borrowed in Cebuano Visayan are acculturated through lexical nativization. Hence, this study recommends that a historical and exploratory study be made to the nativized Hispanic borrowed words in Cebuano Visayan to trace back on its origin which will give a better insight to why such word is born and continues to be used.

The role of word recognition factors and lexical stress in the distribution of consonants in Spanish, English and Dutch

The distribution of labials and coronals within Spanish CVCVCV words and English and Dutch CVCVC words has been studied from a functional perspective and in fine detail. We argue that word recognition is key in the explanation of the results; as a word is pronounced, an increasing number of word candidates is eliminated, and consequently the beginning of the word has a higher communicative load than the more predictable end. We argue that this explains the favouring of labials at the beginning of the word and (some) coronals at the end. A novel finding in this study is that lexical stress is a relevant factor in the distribution of the studied consonants. A possible explanation is that stress plays a role in the elimination word candidates. In Spanish, English, and Dutch discourse, the majority of words begins with a stressed syllable and, therefore, an unstressed initial syllable eliminates more word candidates and the communicative load is reduced more, which affects the distribution of labials and (some) coronals.

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.

Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Reviewed by: Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Enzo E. Vasquez Toral TRANSLOCAS: THE POLITICS OF PUERTO RICAN DRAG AND TRANS PERFORMANCE. By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. 350. Loca, a Spanish word for a madwoman or a slur for an effeminate man, unsettles people as it travels across spaces in the Americas. In Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes breathes a new meaning into this stigmatized identity by introducing the neologism transloca, which accounts for the "trans-" elements of diasporic movement and displacement of Puerto Rico as a "transnation" (15). Instead of proposing transloca as an identity, La Fountain-Stokes builds transloca performance as a theoretical lens to read "Puerto Rican loca, drag, and trans theatrical, film, literary, activist, and cabaret/ nightclub performances" (3). Although the works under analysis extend from the 1960s to the present, Translocas is far from a historical account; rather, it theorizes based on historical events and individual works that speak of a broader phenomenon and considers drag and trans as elastic—and at times intersecting—labels to characterize performance. Specifically, La Fountain-Stokes argues that these transloca performances challenge the status quo and "are key to understanding translocal Puerto Rican, American, Latin American, and Caribbean national imaginaries and social processes" (6). At its core, transloca performance is a decolonial mode of analysis that addresses the complexities of Puerto Rican race, gender, sexuality, class, and migration. Transloca is a term that resists Anglo-American words such as "queer" and the process of globalization and capitalist logics of LGBTQ politics. La Fountain-Stokes puts in conversation an impressive amount of literature about, or produced in, Latin America and the Caribbean across different languages and disciplines. In his opening chapter "Theorizing la Loca," he traces the different theorizations and uses of loca as a debated term in queer and feminist studies and places his own contribution in these genealogies. For instance, the late sociologist Lionel Cantú Jr. used transloca for the first time to refer to a group of Latina transnational feminist scholars (35). Although significantly different in definition, La Fountain-Stokes considers his use of this term as an extension of Cantú's insights. The two subsequent chapters focus on separate groups of performers who embody the contradictory aspects of transloca performance such as life and death and glamour and poverty. Chapter 2 contrasts the transloca aesthetics and self-fashioning of androgynous drag performer Nina Flowers to those of aspiring fashion designer and makeup artist Jorge Steven López Mercado and femme trap singer Kevin Fret, who were both brutally murdered. La Fountain-Stokes delineates the ways in which transloca embodiments and knowledges manifest in these three artists to argue for a broader transloca epistemological framework. Homing in on class as a vector of analysis, chapter 3 argues for the transloca drag of poverty as "a multifaceted, resourceful drag of resistance and negotiation, involving contradictions, invention, and inversion" (70). Drawing from solo performance, autobiography, film, and television appearances, this chapter analyzes the individual works of Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, and Monica Beverly Hillz in juxtaposition to the radical activism of Sylvia Rivera. Historically grounding the work of each of these performers, La Fountain-Stokes shows how they "challenge[d] social structures in the context of inequality" across time (101). Throughout his book, La Fountain-Stokes accounts for whiteness in Puerto Rican identity by introducing some artists as "light-skinned"; nevertheless, it is only in chapters 4 and 5, where race takes center stage, albeit in distinct manners. In chapter 4, La Fountain-Stokes introduces the works of Freddie Mercado in genres such as painting, installation, performance art, and female impersonation. The author coins "ultrabaroque drag of rasanblaj" (reassembly, in Haitian Kreyòl) as a rubric to read Mercado's aesthetics—epitomic transloca work in its ability to cross "the line between sanity and madness, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imaginary" (105). As a light-skinned performer, Mercado's treatment of the politics of race and mestizaje in Puerto Rico...

PERVAINCONSA Scale to Measure the Consumer Behavior of Online Stores of MSMEs Engaged in the Sale of Clothing

The objective of the research was to validate an instrument designed to measure the variables value perception, purchase intention, trust, and satisfaction of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) dedicated to selling clothing. The PERVAINCONSA Scale (acrostic formed with the initial letters of the Spanish words “Percepción de Valor”, “Intención de Compra”, “Confianza” and “Satisfacción”) was constructed. A total of 238 questionnaires were collected from users of online clothing stores in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia (38.7% men and 61.3% women) with an average age of 24.29 years (SD = 8.04). The KMO and Barlett’s test was 0.958. Confirmatory factor analysis provided an excellent model (χ2 = 372.76, gl = 164; χ2/df = 2.27; CFI = 0.956; RMSEA = 0.073, SRMR = 0.035; and Pclose = 0.00). The model showed good scale reliability given that the composite reliability index (CFI), and all values exceeded the minimum threshold of 0.6. The results suggest that this first version of the PERVAINCONSA presents adequate psychometric evidence to measure value perception, purchase intention, trust and satisfaction in consumers of online stores in Peru, Mexico and Colombia. Thus, it seeks to contribute to the advancement of the scientific study of these important variables in the study of consumer behavior in Latin America.

Una reconsideración de la procedencia del Códice Madrid

On two pages of the Maya hieroglyphic manuscript known as the Madrid Codex are found vestiges of European paper. Visible on one of those fragments are handwritten words in Latin and Spanish. Scholars first proposed that the European paper had been incorporated into the substrate of the Maya codex during manufacture, and that the codex was a post-conquest creation. A re-analysis of the codex has shown, however, that the European paper became adhered to the codex after it was manufactured and painted. Another study has argued that it is a fragment of a Bull of the Santa Cruzada and that its presence helps to identify the approximate year and place when the Maya codex fell into the hands of Spanish friars. This article will show that argument is incorrect and that the European writing found in the Madrid Codex does not clarify the provenience of this important document.

A Forgivable Enthusiasm

A Forgivable Enthusiasm

Where the Dust Has Settled

The Spanish word Despoblado, aptly describes Iñaki Bergera’s last photographic series. It translates rather directly in English as depopulated, but its rich Spanish etymology also alludes to the process of unravelling of a human settlement. Fittingly, the images present us with the reality of the abandoned villages in the hillsides of the Spanish Pyrenees. These are ruins of small hamlets, made up of stone cottages carefully clustered together, each of them hugging the topography of the site and collectively forming patterns that are a direct translation of the rural modes of production that made them possible. The images are crisp and calm, and as always with Bergera, the approach is a hybrid between the documentary impulse of topographic photography, and the careful depiction of space more typical of professional architectural photography. More specifically in this case, there seems to be a strong division of labor, with orthographic aerial images that capture the layout of each group of buildings with Cartesian precision, and a series of subjective shots in which the interior and interstitial spaces of the structures are portrayed carefully and lovingly at eye level, as if they were still in use. (...)

A Vocabulary of the Language Spoken in the Region Formerly Known as Leán y Mulia in Honduras

During the years 1787 and 1788, officials of the Spanish crown began to circulate an order from the king to recompile vocabularies of Spanish colonies in the Philippines and the Americas. In some cases, this meant the copying of old books from the early part of the eighteenth century. However, this royal order also included the translation and recording of vocabularies from as many new languages of the Spanish colonies as possible. In Central America, the translation of a predetermined list of a few hundred Spanish words into local languages of the colony was put into the hands of the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City and the provincial fathers of the Dominican and Franciscan orders. Language instructors were responsible for writing the words of the indigenous languages and their Spanish equivalents, while priests, who were well versed in the languages spoken natively throughout the colony, were to be consulted and responsible for the prompt and precise recording of the translated Spanish terms. Those who recorded the documents were instructed to place the Spanish terms in a column to the left. The respective terms in the indigenous languages were placed in columns to the right. Special instructions were given to the recorders and their consultants to explain the orthography that they used to express these words. It seems that the purpose of this exercise was to satisfy the curiosity of the “empress of Russia” on the matter.1Since the late seventeenth century, Spanish officials began to implement colonial policies aimed at subduing an unconquered region of Honduras they referred to as Leán y Mulia. Today this region comprises the modern departments of Yoro and Atlántida. The Spanish named the inhabitants of Leán y Mulia “Xicaque.” The origins of the term are unknown, but previous scholars have linked Xicaque to the Nahuatl word chicáctic, signifying “rude” or “strong.” Despite its questionable origins, previous scholars who have studied the indigenous peoples of Honduras have consistently remarked that the term Xicaque referred to any “uncivilized” indigenous person of Honduras. It is not certain what the people of Leán y Mulia called themselves; their language is barely documented in any other colonial source. The people of Leán y Mulia were called Xicaque in Spanish sources until 1821 and even after that (Rivera 2015: 5).When the people of Leán y Mulia became subjected to Spanish policies in the seventeenth century, they increasingly demonstrated an increased antagonism to the threat imposed by the Spanish. The foundation of a few settlements by the Spanish in the first half of the eighteenth century was the first attempt to bring together the people of Leán y Mulia under Spanish control. By the mid-part of the eighteenth century, Franciscan missionaries, aided by soldiers of the colony, founded mission settlements where the people of Leán y Mulia were sometimes forced to move. Flight from the missions was common, as were defenses meant to keep the Spanish out. The regular antagonism demonstrated by the people of Leán y Mulia slowly became an act of avoidance after a smallpox pandemic decimated the remaining mission populations (Rivera 2015:110–28).The next section presents an excerpt from the source, closely following the original material with the exception of the added column in English. The original document also included columns for languages called Cabecara and Viceyta; these are not included in the following translation.

СЕМИОТИЧЕСКАЯ КОНЦЕПТУАЛИЗАЦИЯ ТЕЛА И СРАВНИТЕЛЬНАЯ ФРАЗЕОЛОГИЯ

The article considers a fragment of the Russian and Spanish semiotic conceptualization of the human body. This fragment is presented by the somatic object “heart”, as there are phraseological somatisms with the name of this object both in Russian and in Spanish. The article provides a semantic description of the Russian word сердце and its Spanish equivalent corazón: ‘an invisible somatic object located in the upper left part of the human body behind the chest. The heart can be heard because it is constantly beating. The main function of the heart is to supply blood to all somatic objects in the human body’. The importance of including physical, structural and functional features of the heart into the semantic representations of these words is demonstrated. Among the physical features of the heart we consider caritivity and redundancy, among the structural ones – the presence of alien objects on / inside the heart (in particular, hair or wool), as the functional ones – the ability of the heart to supply blood to the body and its parts. This feature approach allows to explain some of the uses of the Spanish and Russian words for the heart. The difference in phraseological somatisms of two languages with these words is demonstrated.

Phonological Remarks on Spanish Loanwords in English

This paper focuses on loanword phonology in the context of Spanish words that have become part of the English lexicon in the 20th century. The background section shows that attention has been paid to Spanish words used in English from a lexical point of view, but scarcely regarding phonology. Furthermore, the few existing studies of loanword phonology do not deal in depth with Spanish and English as an example of crosslinguistic contact. Therefore, this paper aims at contributing to the explanation of the phonological adaptations occurring in Spanish words when integrated into English, and therefore the conditions of English phonology that operate in the process of perception and production of Spanish loanwords. In doing so, two areas of interest are analysed: vowel phonemes and consonant phonemes, mainly in relation to their distinctive features and the distribution of units and also considering related phenomena such as phonetic and orthographical factors.

Analyzing transfer learning impact in biomedical cross-lingual named entity recognition and normalization

BackgroundThe volume of biomedical literature and clinical data is growing at an exponential rate. Therefore, efficient access to data described in unstructured biomedical texts is a crucial task for the biomedical industry and research. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the first step for information and knowledge acquisition when we deal with unstructured texts. Recent NER approaches use contextualized word representations as input for a downstream classification task. However, distributed word vectors (embeddings) are very limited in Spanish and even more for the biomedical domain.MethodsIn this work, we develop several biomedical Spanish word representations, and we introduce two Deep Learning approaches for pharmaceutical, chemical, and other biomedical entities recognition in Spanish clinical case texts and biomedical texts, one based on a Bi-STM-CRF model and the other on a BERT-based architecture.ResultsSeveral Spanish biomedical embeddigns together with the two deep learning models were evaluated on the PharmaCoNER and CORD-19 datasets. The PharmaCoNER dataset is composed of a set of Spanish clinical cases annotated with drugs, chemical compounds and pharmacological substances; our extended Bi-LSTM-CRF model obtains an F-score of 85.24% on entity identification and classification and the BERT model obtains an F-score of 88.80% . For the entity normalization task, the extended Bi-LSTM-CRF model achieves an F-score of 72.85% and the BERT model achieves 79.97%. The CORD-19 dataset consists of scholarly articles written in English annotated with biomedical concepts such as disorder, species, chemical or drugs, gene and protein, enzyme and anatomy. Bi-LSTM-CRF model and BERT model obtain an F-measure of 78.23% and 78.86% on entity identification and classification, respectively on the CORD-19 dataset.ConclusionThese results prove that deep learning models with in-domain knowledge learned from large-scale datasets highly improve named entity recognition performance. Moreover, contextualized representations help to understand complexities and ambiguity inherent to biomedical texts. Embeddings based on word, concepts, senses, etc. other than those for English are required to improve NER tasks in other languages.

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

L2 within-language morphological competition during spoken word recognition

ABSTRACT Bilinguals recognize words with shared morphology and phonology cross-linguistically (i.e., cognates) faster than words that do not have these characteristics. Moreover, higher phonological overlap in cognates enhances the effects, which suggests that phonology eases word recognition. However, it is currently unclear whether words compete purely morphologically before spoken word recognition within language and whether proficiency in the L2 modulates the degree of morphological competition. Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners of Spanish with varying L2 proficiency completed an auditory lexical decision task in Spanish. Stimuli were phonological sequences of Spanish words prior to a recognition point (e.g., /mark/ in /marko/) whose activated cohorts were minimal pairs. Some pairs were morphologically related (e.g., huerto ‘vegetable patch’ versus huerta ‘vegetable garden’), whereas some others had no morphological relationship (e.g., marco ‘frame’ versus marca ‘brand’). Results showed that both groups processed solely phonological competitors in a similar way as they did with morphological competitors. Taken together, these findings suggest that morphological relatedness does not modulate either L1 or L2 spoken word recognition prior to a recognition point when speakers listen to words in absence of context. In addition, the findings suggest that the L2 recognition architecture is qualitatively similar to that of native speakers.

La silva en el Anacreón castellano de Quevedo

Abstract This paper studies the characteristics of silvas in Anacreón castellano (1609) by Quevedo and the possible reasons for the use of this metric form, in relation to its features as a translator of classical texts. As a significant example, his paraphrase of the two anacreontics dedicated to the rose is analysed. In both silvas, Quevedo usually translates a Greek word into two Spanish words and introduces complete verses or new expressions at the end of the verse, which, sometimes, rhyme with words translated from Greek. These procedures confirm Quevedo’s tendency to amplify descriptions of nature and praise for the rose, which offered renewed literary motifs.

“In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme”: Don Quijote en spanglish y los desafíos de la traducción bilingüe

Spanglish, the mixing of Spanish and English in oral and written communi-cation, has an increasing importance as a literary code. Challenged by derogatory comments on the poor aesthetic possibilities of Spanglish, Mexican American scholar Ilan Stavans translated the first chapter of Cervantes’ Don Quijote into a mixed language made of English, Spanish and hybrid words. The result provoked the hilarity of many readers, but also the indignation of Castilian purists who opposed the invasion of their mother tongue by a foreign language and the desecration of the most out- standing monument of the Hispanic Culture, while American Chicanos criticized the quality of the translation, arguing that Stavans ’ Spanglish fails to reflect accurately the reality of bilingual speech in daily life. In my paper I propose some reflections about this controversy and I try to analyse Stavans’ intentions and strategies in this translation of a canonical classical text into a non-normative and highly stigmatized variety of spoken language. As it is directed to a bilingual audience, this translation loses its principal raison d’être, that is to make the text understandable for foreign readers, but it fulfils other functions.

The evolution of vowel perception in second language learners of Spanish

Given the importance of understanding speech perception in language acquisition research (Best, 1991) and building on the methodology of Garcia de las Bayonas (2004), this remotely conducted study explores the acquisition of correct Spanish vowel perception by English-speaking learners with special attention paid to the role of syllable stress. Participants include Spanish speakers (n = 4), English speakers (n = 7), and beginning Spanish students (n = 9). In a discrimination task, learners performed most accurately with Spanish vowels in stressed syllables (88.6%) with less accuracy discriminating those in unstressed syllables (82.2%). This is likely due to the tendency of American English to reduce many unstressed vowels. In an identification task, participants selected vowel sounds (from English and Spanish inventories) believed to belong in Spanish words. High accuracy was shown identifying Spanish vowels /i/, /o/, and /u/ but all groups struggled to correctly identify /e/ and /a/, likely because these vowels occupy similar acoustic spaces as English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/. Despite imperfect perception, learners report high confidence in their responses, indicating under-developed vowel inventories in the target language. At the time of presentation, these results will include larger and more diverse participant groups, including students at different stages of experience with the target language.

The Children’s English and Spanish Speech Recognition Test (ChEgSS): Normative data

The Children’s English and Spanish Speech Recognition Test (ChEgSS) is a clinical tool for assessing children’s English and Spanish word recognition in a noise or two-talker masker. The English and Spanish versions of the test are acoustically, phonetically, and linguistically similar. The goal of this study was to establish threshold norms for Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children, and to evaluate effects of age and language proficiency on performance. Participants were 81 Spanish-English bilingual and 89 English monolingual children (4–17 years) with normal hearing. Children completed word recognition testing using an adaptive, 4AFC procedure with a picture-pointing response. All children completed testing in both a noise and a two-talker masker. Bilingual children were tested in English and in Spanish, and monolingual children were tested in English. Language proficiency was assessed using standardized assessments of receptive vocabulary as well as parent report. Both groups of children performed more poorly in two-talker speech than in speech-shaped noise. Preliminary results indicate that age and receptive vocabulary were significant predictors of word recognition performance in both languages and for both maskers. Performance for balanced bilinguals (i.e., similar language proficiency in Spanish and English) was similar for Spanish and English stimuli.

Las misteriosas /r/ de los adverbios en -mentedel español medieval

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to analyze the affix ‑m(i)entreof modal adverbs in Medieval Spanish, e.g.fuertemientre. The hypothesis is that the non-etymological, epentheticrmay be analyzed from a phonological perspective only, without grammatical or lexical explanations. The paper first reviews the three traditional explanations for the non-etymologicalrin modal adverbs, especially the analogical one, which poses that therof these adverbs is an analogy from the etymologicalrof the temporal adverbm(i)entre. The paper shows the weakness of these traditional analyses. The paper then presents an alternative analysis on phonological basis, which has greater parsimony than traditional explanations, adding typological evidence outside the grammatical field of modal adverbs, and showing that a non-etymologicalrappeared in many Spanish words, and in other Romance languages, in the same phonetic and syllabic contexts as the modal affix ‑m(i)entre. Finally, the paper proposes three causes for the loss of modal ‑m(i)entre: the weakening of intra-paradigmatic support from modal ‑miente, a homonymic clash between modal ‑m(i)entreand temporalm(i)entre, and the generalization of the learned form ‑mente. The paper places the diachronic loss of the modal affix withrin a theoretical frame of multicausality.