Varieties Of Spanish Research Articles

Discourse markers of rejection in three varieties of Spanish

In the study of discourse markers in Spanish, a field with great vitality in the last few decades, it is common to overlook the expressions used to accept or reject a proposal, suggestion or petition, often included within the broader functions of agreement and disagreement. These answers, used in an informal oral interactive context, exhibit a rich dialectal variety. Due to the fleeting nature of their contexts of use, they are difficult to formally register for further study, especially when looking at them from a panhispanic perspective. For this reason, an anonymous survey was designed in order to ask native speakers about their familiarity with a series of discourse markers used to answer “no” to a proposal. The questionnaire was disseminated in the countries of Spain, Mexico and Colombia, specifically around the capital areas. Participants (N=223) evaluated from 1 (I do not know this expression) to 5 (I use this expression frequently) a series of possible responses, and they were offered the option to provide some other answers not included in the original list. Results show that, while some discourse markers are used to a certain degree in the three varieties, others are prototypical from one of these dialects. The opportunity to offer new expressions was very productive, especially in the case of participants from Colombia and Mexico. While this study focuses on three particular regions, it opens the door to a comparative analysis of discourse markers of negation throughout the Spanish speaking world.

Dentro de ocho días… ¿o siete? La expresión de las distancias temporales en el español de Costa Rica

Temporal distances are usually indicated by expressions that specify a quantity of certain time unit (e. g., days, weeks or months). In different varieties of Spanish, two distinct ways of calculating this number are reported: (1) counting only the units that pass by between two events, or (2) taking into account both units within which the events take place. This study examines the use of these two strategies by the means of a questionnaire applied to Costa Rican students. It concludes that the former is the most general one, but that, when specifying distances close to a week and above in terms of days, both strategies are used, which causes ambiguity.

A Political Ecology of Food Security in La Guajira, Colombia

Inspired by my experiences while studying abroad in Colombia, in this paper I seek to explain the environmental, social, and political causes of widespread food insecurity in the Colombian department of La Guajira, a rural, isolated desert region with a high percentage of indigenous peoples. I first perform a literature review of geographic research on food security in peripheral regions, followed by a comprehensive case study analysis of La Guajira, drawing together sources from a variety of disciplines, in English and Spanish, in order to provide a new perspective on the region’s crisis through a multiscalar political ecology lens specifically focused on human-environment interactions, marginalization, social difference, and discourses. I find that from racialized frontier capitalism in the early 1900s to contemporary neoliberal extractivism, decades of attempts to integrate the region into national and global economic markets have weakened traditional food systems and substantially increased food insecurity. More broadly, I explore how food security, local agency in food systems, and environmental sustainability can be increased by rethinking our conventional ideas of “development,” “progress,” and “isolation.”

WHEN CLITIC SYSTEMS COLLIDE, ANIMACY, FOR THE MOST PART, BEATS GENDER

In this paper we present elicitation results from an experiment on the acquisition of 3rd person object clitics by children of Paraguayan parents living in Buenos Aires and their mothers. These children are immersed in a situation of contact between two varieties of Spanish: the Paraguayan system (∅ for inanimate objects and LE for animate objects) and the local Argentinian system which uses LO for Masculine and LA for Feminine clitics. Results show that the Paraguayan mothers use substantially more LO/LA when compared with adults in Paraguay, as described by Choi (2000), suggesting a great deal of attrition. Their children on the other hand use far less LO/LA, but at the same time are not adopting as a group a LE/∅ system. Examining 19 Mother/Child dyads, we find that no children are exclusively using LO/LA users but some children are exclusively using LE/∅. As for mother we find some LO/LA users and the rest uses a mixed system. Interestingly, overall children use fewer forms than mothers.

Variant patterns of sibilant debuccalization in Camuno

Abstract Some varieties of Camuno, an Eastern Lombard variety spoken in Valcamonica, Italy, show clear evidence of what appears to be an unconditioned sound change of S > h, where S had [s] and [θ] variants (Bonfadini 1995a; Cresci 2014). However, neighboring varieties in the upper parts of the valley retain inherited S and, in at least one village, Cerveno, debuccalization is limited to intervocalic position. In this study, we attempt to explain dialect variation in Camuno in terms of s-debuccalization as a lenition process within the general framework of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004a, 2006, 2015) building on the typology established by Ferguson (1990). The probability of articulatory undershoot is greatest in the V_V environment, and all dialects with S > h show the sound change in this context. In medial clusters like rS, lS, nS, where there is articulatory overlap and longer sustained constriction, articulatory undershoot is less likely, and S is most likely to be maintained, as it is in Cerveno. A treatment of S > h as lenition implies that [s] and [θ] were produced with spread vocal folds in languages where this sound change has been observed. Here we offer additional evidence for aspiration as an active feature in Camuno phonology and suggest possible origins of this feature during the long period of contact with Longobardic. Another central issue explored in this study are phonetic factors that might differentiate intervocalic s > h from s > h that originates in the syllable coda, as in many varieties of Spanish.

Naturalistic L2 acquisition and the formation of an immigrant variety of Spanish

Immigrants in their host country sometimes take advantage of the assistance offered in order to learn formally the host country language in a classroom setting. This is not always the case. This contribution examines the variety of Spanish that was created by an immigrant who arrived in Spain to work in the restaurant industry. Because of her work situation, she did not take formal Spanish lessons. Rather, she constructed her own variety of Spanish based on input she received on the job and in her interactions with native Spanish speakers. Three aspects of her grammatical system are the focus: tense-aspect marking, copula use, and the pronoun system. The solutions the immigrant created for communication show she has developed a grammar that is different from that of the native speakers of the host language , and its nature is largely predictable by appealing to frequency and detectability of forms in discourse and the process of L1 transfer.

The influence of Guarani on gender agreement in Paraguayan and Correntino Spanish: A contrastive analysis

In this paper we analyze the influence of Guarani, a genderless language, on patterns of gender agreement in two distinct Spanish varieties, Paraguayan Spanish and Correntino Spanish. Using two unique conversational corpora, we show that, of the two varieties, Paraguayan Spanish more closely resembles Standard Spanish in patterns of gender agreement, but the cases of nonagreement that do occur are found in a wide variety of linguistic contexts, resembling the kinds of transfer effects common in L2 varieties of Spanish in speakers whose L1 is genderless. Correntino Spanish exhibits patterns of nonagreement that are not only more common but are limited in linguistic scope, i.e., only occurring in noun phrases involving feminine nouns with non-article modifiers. We attribute the differences between these two varieties to the differing presence of Guarani in the two regions where they are currently spoken. Paraguayan Spanish, in closer contact with Guarani, is subject to synchronic L2 transfer effects, while Correntino Spanish, a largely monolingual variety in the modern day, is characterized by diachronic L2 transfer effects that have fossilized and come to be found in the speech of monolinguals.

Actitudes lingüísticas de guanacastecos hacia la variedad lingüística del español del Valle Central

In this research paper, a study based on linguistic behaviors present in Guanacaste speakers has been performed. The study addresses the linguistic varieties of Spanish in the Central Valle of a student sample from the National University of Costa Rica.The main objective is to analyze the linguistic behaviors of a group of Guanacaste speakers towards the linguistic varieties of Spanish within Central Valle. To accomplish this objective, a five-level Likert scale questionnaire is being proposed as the instrument to collect data on linguistic behaviors from Spanish from Central Valle. Moreover, in the same questionnaire, there have been included three open questions. This qualitative approach is being used to collect valuable information to complement the statistical data. Subsequently, the information obtained from the questionnaires is analyzed using statistical tools such as comparative charts and graphs. The objective would be to determine the linguistic behaviors of Guanacaste students from Chorotega and Omar Dengo’s National University sites. Regarding the results, the majority of the students interviewed (migrated and non-migrated) are aware of the linguistic differences between Guanacaste and Vallecentraleños speakers, linguistic prejudices still persist in the popular belief of some Costa Rican speakers; and finally, related with the linguistic variety under study, the Spanish from the Central Valley, there co-occur accommodation processes or linguistic adaptations, linguistic insecurity, linguistic change (manifested with the phenomenon of migration), attitudes of loyalty and linguistic identity reinforced with attitudes of greater awareness and acceptance of the linguistic and cultural diversity of Costa Rica. It may be concluded that in regard to the perception of the interviewed speakers, the historical division between the varieties of Spanish from Guanacaste and the Central Valley has been kept. However, the study of such linguistic varieties shows a leveling and progressive approach of both linguistic varieties, it is especially notable in those students who have lived abroad. The present study has five sections: the introduction; the theoretical frame; the methodological framework; the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the linguistic behaviors within the areas of the present study (Guanacaste and Central Valley) and finally, conclusions.

Morphosyntactic stereotypes of speakers with different genders and sexual orientations: an experimental investigation

Abstract Previous research has identified differences in language use between speakers representing different genders and sexual orientations, as well as stereotypical beliefs about the existence of such differences. The present paper investigates such stereotypical beliefs among speakers of two varieties of Spanish and explores whether linguistic stereotypes of gender and sexual orientation are stronger in a society with more conservative gender roles. We conducted an experiment where 252 speakers of European and Mexican Spanish were shown pairs of texts and sentences depicting the same event but differing in the use of morphosyntactic resources, creating stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine” variants of the same text or sentence. The informants were asked which of the variants was more likely uttered by a woman (rather than a man), a lesbian woman (rather than a straight woman), or a gay man (rather than a straight man). Some of the morphosyntactic features were strongly associated with speaker gender (e.g., use of first- and second-person singular) and others with lesbian (e.g., use of impersonal structures) or gay speakers (e.g., direct reported speech). Contrary to expectations, the responses did not differ according to informants’ age, gender, or nationality. While the present study did not reveal any differences between the two societies, more cross-linguistic and cultural research is needed to elucidate the effect of society on morphosyntactic variation and stereotypes thereof.

Fraseografia digitale e varietà diatopiche dello spagnolo.

This article aims to present a proposal for the lemmatisation of Hispanic phraseology in a digital multilingual phraseological dictionary. Indeed, in the current lexicographic panorama, bi- or multilingual electronic dictionaries capable of comprehensively presenting the phraseology of the different diatopic varieties of Spanish are still lacking. For this reason, within the framework of the Digital Multilingual Phraseological Dictionary (DFMD) project, currently being developed at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, a preliminary study illustrated in this paper has been carried out. This focuses on the inclusion of Spanish phraseology in a Spanish-Italian/ Italian-Spanish bilingual repertory. In the following chapters, I first outline the state of the art as regards the presence of Hispanic phraseology in existing digital lexicographic works (chapter 2), and then move on to the presentation of the elaborated phraseographic proposal: in particular, I will set out the parameters adopted for the selection of the phraseological corpus under investigation and its subsequent lemmatisation in the Venetian repertory (chapter 3). Subsequently, I will examine some examples of lexicographic entries in which the proposed methodology is applied (chapter 4). Finally, I will offer some points of re-thinking for possible future studies (chapter 5).

10 Things You Should Not Forget When Adapting a Test Into Spanish

Abstract: Adapting a test from one language to another is no easy task. The literal translation of the items is certainly not enough since the meanings and references change from one language to another. In the case of Spanish adaptations, the problem becomes even more complex, as there are many varieties of Spanish, almost as many as Spanish-speaking countries. This article presents 10 tips for adapting tests to Spanish regarding the morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic elements that should be considered when adapting an instrument to Spanish. These tips are based on experience with the adaptation of various instruments, such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scales (WISC-III, WAIS-IV, and WISC-V) and the Big Five from English, and the ELFE scale, MARKO-D, and the Berlin Intelligence Test from German.

Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-phrase headed by the preposition por introduces an agent rather than a cause or reason. The verb has active morphology—it is always third-person plural, and accusative clitics (e.g., te) and DOM-marked objects are possible. This type of sentence, which I descriptively label an active–passive (A-P) hybrid, has been mentioned in previous literature on contact varieties in Mayan-speaking regions of Mexico and Guatemala, but it has not been precisely described or analyzed formally. I argue that A-P hybrid constructions are instances of grammatical object passives. Grammatical object passives have certain active properties—accusative case is assigned to a theme argument and the morphology of the verb is active, but like passives, they require that the expression of the agent be a by-phrase rather than a grammatical subject. I claim that this is possible in this variety of Spanish due to the emergence of a null pronoun, absent in other varieties of Spanish, that can merge in the specifier of Voice and restrict, rather than saturate, an agent argument, permitting the subsequent addition of a third-person by-phrase. I demonstrate that this analysis is able to explain its hybrid properties as well as other person restrictions on the by-phrases that express the agent. Finally, I describe avenues of future research that will help discern the role that language contact may have played in the emergence of A-P hybrids.

The role of perceptual salience in a strengthening sound change

Abstract The current study examines the extent to which perceptual factors may account for the emergence of assibilated variants of the alveopalatal approximant /j/ in two geographically remote varieties of Spanish. Participants from Medellin, Colombia and Santiago, Dominican Republic completed a discrimination task and a matched guise. Both tasks presented listeners with stimuli containing affricate [ʤ] and approximant [j] allophones of /j/. Participants were more accurate when discriminating between sound pairs that included the affricate allophone, suggesting that the presence of (af)frication is a salient acoustic cue upon which judgments are reliably made. Therefore, we argue that the emergence of assibilated variants ([ʤ], [ʒ]) can be explained in part by more prominent acoustic cuing and thus greater perceptual salience. Evidence of the relationship between these findings and a possible sound change in progress is observed in the association of social characteristics with [ʤ] and [j].

Nominal Possession in Contact Spanish Spoken by Mapudungun/Spanish Bilinguals

Possession has been scarcely studied in the variety of Spanish in contact with Mapudungun and in Chilean Spanish. In this contribution, we analyze the nominal possessive constructions found in a corpus of interviews with speakers from five communities: three Mapudungun–Spanish bilingual communities from the Araucanía Region, one Spanish monolingual rural community from the Bío Bío Region, and one Spanish monolingual urban community from the Araucanía Region. The possessive constructions found in the contact Spanish, rural Spanish, and urban Spanish varieties are analyzed and compared to describe the domain of possession and to propose some possible explanations from the perspective of language contact theory for the case of the Spanish spoken by bilinguals. From the corpus of transcribed interviews, nominal possessive constructions were selected, classified, described, and compared. Double possession with restrictive relative clauses, and unstressed possessive pronouns plus a prepositional phrase with genitive/specific value, showed a limited frequency of occurrence. These constructions are analyzed using the Code-Copying framework. This perspective accounts for the observed equivalencies between both languages in contact and the constructions emerging in the bilinguals’ speech. This work contributes to the documentation of the variety and, more generally, to the description of the expression of possession in the Latin American contact varieties of Spanish.

Diverging Grammaticalization Patterns across Spanish Varieties: The Case of perdón in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish

This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized around the concept of ‘face’ and based on spoken data of Spanish from Mexico and Spain. This taxonomy turns out to be a fruitful methodological tool for the analysis of apologetic markers: it does not only offer usage-based evidence for previous theorizing concerning the grammaticalization process of apologetic markers, but also leads to a refinement of these previous results from a contrastive point of view. Evidence from both corpora suggests a more advanced stage in the grammaticalization process of perdón in Mexican Spanish, where it can be used not only as a self-face-saving device geared towards the positive face of the speaker, but also in turn-taking contexts oriented towards the negative face of the interlocutor. Peninsular Spanish, on the other hand, resorts to a more varied gamut of apologetic markers in these contexts.

The boundary-crossing constraint revisited: movement verbs across varieties of Spanish

Abstract Talmy divided the world’s languages according to how they express movement. Spanish, a verb-framed language, purportedly constrains the use of motion verbs expressing the manner of movement (such as roll) to contexts in which no spatial boundary is crossed. Previous research suggests that this constraint sometimes does not apply. We report the first large-scale investigation of the constraint and its modulating factors (movement direction, verb type, entering/exiting, Ground size, the preposition used) across different Spanish-speaking communities. A task with open-ended description of animated videos, a sentence interpretation task, and a rating task found that Spanish and Latin American speakers (n = 180 in total) often use manner verbs to describe boundary-crossing situations (especially entering a place), although this is modulated by the preposition following the verb (more with a than en). Better understanding of this constraint in verb-framed languages has applications in, for instance, L2 acquisition research.

Arming Slaves in Early Modern Maritime Asia

AbstractWhile there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.

First person singular subject pronoun expression of young Spanish speakers from Quito, Ecuador

Abstract This variationist study analyzes the first-person subject pronoun expression (SPE) of speakers from Quito, Ecuador. To date, this morphosyntactic variable has not been explored in this Andean variety of Spanish. The data consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews. Results reveal an SPE rate of 17%, comparable to other Andean Spanish varieties. As per Rbrul’s quantitative analysis, the predictors that promote the presence of the ‘yo’ in this variety of Spanish are co-referential Priming, switch reference, ambiguous TMA endings and main clauses. In addition, following Orozco and Hurtado (2021), lexical effects of the verb were observed by analyzing the verb lemma. This predictor revealed similarly opposing tendencies between verbs in the same lexical category. This study adds to the growing body of SPE research by examining which linguistic variables influence the use of ‘yo’ in this Ecuadorian Andean Spanish (EAS) variety and comparing these results to those of other Andean Spanish varieties.

Bilingual and Spanish Language Media in the U.S. as a Language Maintenance Tool Among Latinx Communities

In this paper, we discuss the status and vitality of Spanish in the U.S., including the presence and characteristics of Spanish-language communicative spaces, including the media and other digital venues. Given the discrimination that many Latinx Spanish speakers suffer in the U.S., for example, through English-only initiatives or restrictive language policies, we draw attention to the important role that communicative spaces such as media have in this country for promoting and aiding the maintenance of heritage and minority languages. We also critique the monolingual assumptions that there are only certain types of “correct” language, in this case, standard Spanish or “Walter Cronkite Spanish,” which implies a variety as it is used in a country where the official language is Spanish (e.g., Mexico or Colombia). We are interested in looking at how Spanish is used and promoted and the role of U.S. media in contexts where audiences are mostly bilingual. We argue that U.S. Spanish, as it is spoken by Chicanx/Latinx speakers, has been historically undervalued or underrepresented in the media, thus perpetuating monolingual ideologies that do not serve bilingual and multilingual audiences and indeed affect the perception of local varieties of Spanish and their speakers. With the advent of new technologies and the sociodemographic transformation of Latinx audiences, new media production in U.S. Spanish, Spanglish, and other local varieties have the potential of serving as an important tool to combat language loss due to linguistic discrimination and harmful hegemonic monolingual ideologies.

Cognitive underpinnings of the meaning of Spanish estar

Abstract The Spanish copula verb estar is currently taking part in two of the most well-known paths of semantic change across different dialectal varieties of Spanish: (a) as a main copula verb, in its encroachment on the domain of ser, and (b) as the auxiliary in the Present Progressive marker, as it encroaches in the domain of the Simple Present form (i.e., Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Fuchs 2020). Here we argue for the hypothesis that estar’s participation in both paths of change is not coincidental. Focusing on the copular use, we present arguments for the proposal that estar’s encroachment is connected to its lexico-conceptual structure, which, under specific communicative pressures, is afforded greater conversational informativity, thus systematically expanding its licensing contexts and, as a result, bolstering its use. Evidence consistent with this analysis emerges from use variation for estar across several dialects of Spanish, both in its copular and auxiliary uses.