New insights into an old form: A variationist analysis of the pleonastic possessive in Guatemalan Spanish

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Elsig
Keyword(s):  
Interview Data ◽  
Central American ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Structural Position ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
Context Specific

AbstractRomance languages differ as regards the adjectival or article-like status of prenominal possessives. While in Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Old Spanish, they pattern like adjectives and co-occur with articles, and in French and Modern Spanish, they compete with the latter for the same structural position. The different distribution of possessives is claimed to reflect distinct stages on a grammaticalization cline (Alexiadou, 2004). This paper focuses on a variety of Central American Spanish where the Old Spanish co-occurrence of an (indefinite) article and a possessive in the prenominal domain has been maintained (as in una mi amiga ‘a my friend’). Based on a variationist study of interview data extracted from the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish for Spain and America (PRESEEA) Guatemala corpus, I will argue that it is indeed the indefinite article that shows signs of retarded grammaticalization. Yet, rather than extending to the variety as a whole, this retardation is context-specific.

scholarly journals Indefinite article + possessive + noun in Spanish: A case of refunctionalization?

Languages ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Enrique Pato
Keyword(s):  
Central American ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Opaque Material ◽  
Grammatical Construction ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
Grammatical Change

The phenomenon under discussion is an example of a grammatical change that can be explained by refunctionalization, and as such, can be understood as the acquisition of a new meaning by an ‘endangered’ grammatical construction, which is reassigned to express another value. Refunctionalization involves the development of a new function (in this case a syntactic-semantic one). When an item loses its function, or is marginal within a system, it can be lost (as happens with the construction under study in Standard Spanish), it can be ‘saved’ as a marginal element (as in some areas of American Spanish varieties) or it can be reused for other purposes (as in the Central American Spanish varieties). The latter case presents new discursive values. Hence, this construction should be understood as an example of reusing grammatical functionally opaque material for new purposes.

scholarly journals ORDEN DE PALABRAS Y POSICIÓN DE LOS CLÍTICOS PRONOMINALES EN LAS CONSTRUCCIONES IMPERATIVAS DE LAS LENGUAS ROMÁNICAS MEDIEVALES | WORD ORDER AND PRONOMINAL CLITIC POSITION IN THE IMPERATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF OLD ROMANCE LANGUAGES

2017 ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Montserrat Batllori ◽  
Assumpció Rost
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
The One ◽  
Shed Light

<p>Esta investigación aporta evidencias acerca del hecho de que el español medieval y también otras lenguas románicas antiguas (portugués e italiano, por ejemplo) son claros exponentes de la clase II de Rivero y Terzi (1995: 301, e.g. 1) en que el imperativo no presenta una sintaxis diferenciada de la de las oraciones matrices, mientras que, como mínimo, el español actual formaría parte de las lenguas de la clase I, cuyos imperativos tienen una sintaxis propia. Se muestra, asimismo, que los cambios correspondientes al orden de palabras de las construcciones imperativas corresponden a un proceso de sintactización que ha desvinculado las estructuras de imperativo de la morfología verbal (y, por consiguiente, de la sintaxis de las oraciones matrices) y ha comportado un cambio hacia un tipo de estructura con requisitos sintácticos específicos.  Además, por otra parte, nuestros datos permiten profundizar en la teoría del contacto lingüístico y en las condiciones necesarias para que se dé la transferencia de estructuras arcaicas del español medieval al español atlántico. De acuerdo con ellos, podemos afirmar que el mantenimiento de estructuras medievales en Hispanoamérica se debe supeditar al hecho de que las lenguas indígenas de adstrato posean construcciones que faciliten la transferencia lingüística y, por tanto, revitalicen un patrón que ya se encontraba en retroceso en el español peninsular. </p><p>Abstract<em>: This research provides evidence in favour of the fact that Old Spanish, as well as other Old Romance languages (Portuguese and Italian, for example) accommodate to Rivero and Terzi’s (1995: 301, e.g. 1) pattern II in which imperative structures of the languages do not display a different syntax from the one exhibited by main clauses, whereas Modern Spanish should be classified as belonging to pattern I, the imperative constructions of which present their own specific syntax. We put forward that the changes undergone by the word order of imperative sentences through time should be attributed to a syntactization process that tended to detach imperatives from a specific verbal morphology (and also from the syntax of main clauses) and brought about new specific syntactic requirements for them to be licensed. Furthermore, our data allow us to shed light on the theory of linguistic change and the necessary conditions to have transference phenomena from Old Spanish to Hispano-American Spanish. Our data show that, so as to posit that Old Spanish constructions of any sort have been transferred to Hispano-American Spanish, there should be similar configurations in the indigenous languages that enable this transference through language contact and can bring about an increasing use of the structures that already were receding in Peninsular Medieval Spanish.</em></p>

El tú como un “mask”: Voseo and Salvadoran and Honduran Identity in the United States

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Woods ◽  
Susana V. Rivera-Mills
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Central American ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Strategic Approach ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
Linguistic Attitudes

AbstractThis sociolinguistic study explores linguistic attitudes of Salvadorans and Hondurans living in the United States towards the use of voseo, a distinguishing feature of Central American Spanish. Using sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic observations, the Central American experience in Oregon and Washington is examined regarding linguistic attitudes toward voseo and tuteo and how these influence Salvadoran and Honduran identity in U.S. communities that are primarily Mexican-American. Initial findings point to participants developing ethnolinguistic masks and an expanded use of tú as a strategic approach to integration into the established Mexican-American community, while at the same time maintaining a sense of Central American identity.

The V2 syntax of Medieval Romance

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Sam Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Old Occitan ◽  
Old Portuguese ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Detailed Presentation

This chapter provides a detailed presentation of the main data and arguments which have been proposed in favour of claiming that the Medieval Romance languages were V2 systems and considers data from Old French, Old Occitan, Old Italo-Romance varieties, Old Spanish, and Old Portuguese. It provides new qualitative and quantitative evidence to show the nature of the prefield, Germanic inversion, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the precise types of verb-first and verb-third-or-greater orders provide new evidence in favour of the V2 hypothesis. It also suggests that the diachronic emergence of a V2 grammar is entirely plausible on the basis of the available data. The main objections to the V2 account proposed in the literature are evaluated and argued to face empirical and theoretical problems.

Constructions of uncontrolled state or event

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Elvira
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Construction ◽  
Semantic Values

Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence. In the early centuries of the history of Spanish only a few verbs were integrated in the new scheme, which could receive an experience, modal or quantitative meaning, depending on an analogical association with certain frequent verbs. As the construction gained productivity, the importance of these few specific verbs as models for the newly integrated ones was reduced and the construction as a whole was understood in a more general sense of uncontrolled state or event. This paper provides a history of the construction in its different stages and tries to uncover the mechanism and factors that favored the increase in its productivity over the centuries. It also attempts to understand these facts from a typological standpoint, as an effect of some kind of a transitivity split that took place in Old Spanish, which gave rise to a type of marked construction, associated to some specific verbs.

scholarly journals Sobre la llamada oposición aspectual entre «he cantado» y «canté» en el español de América

2020 ◽  
Vol LXXVI (76) ◽  
pp. 361-372
Author(s):  
Witold Sobczak
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
American Variety ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
The Past ◽  
Latin American Spanish ◽  
American Spanish

On the so-called aspectual opposition between «he cantado» and «canté» in Latin American Spanish. According to the majority of linguists, the opposition between the forms «he cantado» and «canté» in the American variety of Spanish is related to aspect, which may raise doubts if it is assumed that aspect is a grammatical category typical of Slavic languages and absent in Romance languages. Based on this assumption and on a precise distinction between aspect and Aktionsart, the author attempts to prove that aspect did not exist in Latin, nor does it exist in contemporary Spanish. Therefore the claim that the tenses antepresente («he cantado») and pretérito («canté») are carriers of aspectual features is hard to accept. Keywords: aspect, Aktionsart, Spanish tense system, expressing the past O tak zwanej opozycji aspektowej pomiędzy «he cantado» a «canté» w hiszpańskim w Ameryce. Streszczenie: Według większości lingwistów opozycja pomiędzy formami «he cantado» a «canté» w amerykańskiej odmianie języka hiszpańskiego ma charakter aspektowy, co może wzbudzać wątpliwości, jeśli uzna się aspekt za kategorię gramatyczną typową dla języków słowiańskich i nieobecną w językach romańskich. W oparciu o to założenie oraz precyzyjne rozróżnienie pomiędzy aspektem a Aktionsartem autor próbuje udowodnić, że aspekt nie istniał ani w łacinie, ani nie istnieje we współczesnym języku hiszpańskim i w związku z tym trudne do zaakceptowania wydaje się stwierdzenie, że czasy antepresente («he cantado ») i pretérito («canté») są nośnikami treści aspektowych. Słowa klucze: aspekt, Aktionsart, hiszpański system czasowy, wyrażanie przeszłości

Interviews as a Means to Understand (and Silence) Contemporary Africa and Its Voices

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrycja Stys
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Context Specific

Interviewing is commonly utilized in all disciplines of the social sciences. Across Africa, interviews are undertaken in a variety of diverse contexts by researchers from within and without the continent. Although the challenges many face are context specific, they are certainly not Africa specific: from research design and preparation, to implementation in cross-cultural, extremely rural, or conflict-affected environments. In order to overcome these challenges, researchers must first recognize that interview data encompass much more than respondents’ answers to posed questions. Interview data, obtained in the process of organizing and conducting interviews, are the information collected before, during, and after the interview encounter; and analyses of the context in which they are pursued, including encountered difficulties. Together, these rich data further our understanding of contemporary Africa, as they do of other continents. It is rare, however, for published outputs to fully engage with the processes of preparing for, enacting, and interpreting the interview encounter. Such omissions limit our understanding of the research process and impede methodological transparency, thereby obscuring possible biases in data and the conclusions drawn from it.

Synchronic and diachronic analysis of prepositional multiword modifiers across Romance languages

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Piunno ◽  
Vittorio Ganfi
Keyword(s):  
Functional Relation ◽  
Prepositional Phrase ◽  
Quantitative Approach ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Middle French ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Multiword Expressions ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Lexicological and lexicographical studies on multiword expressions in Romance languages have significantly increased in recent years. Even though some attention has been paid to Multiwords functioning as adjectives and adverbs, the structural and the functional relation between them has not been clarified yet. Employing both a qualitative and quantitative approach, this corpus-based investigation aims at exploring the diatopic distribution and the evolution of Romance multiword lexemes having the form of a prepositional phrase and the function of an adjective or/and an adverb (or both functions). According to data taken from corpora of Latin, Old Italian, Old Spanish and Middle French, this contribution investigates the relationship between the different degrees of schematicity and the productivity of this kind of multiword lexemes in order to highlight the evolutional path and the diachronic/diatopic principles engaged in the multiword modifying system across the different Romance languages taken into consideration.

Quelques particularités dans l’expression de la détermination du nom. Comparaison entre cinq langues romanes

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Gorana Bikić-Carić
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Change Of Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Description

"Some Features in the Expression of the Noun Determination. Comparison Between Five Romance Languages. In this article we would like to compare the noun determination in five Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian). All the languages examined here share the main uses of articles: known referent, generic use, unique entities, abstract names, inalienable possession for the definite article, or introduction of a new element into the discourse and description for the indefinite article. However, we wanted to show some peculiarities. We used the same text in five languages, (La sombra del viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafón) which is part of the RomCro corpus, composed in the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the Department of Romance Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The results of the analysis showed a clear difference between French and the other languages. As expected, French uses the indefinite article in plural much more often, as well as the partitive article, which does not exist in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Likewise, the possessive adjective is more common in French than in other languages which use the definite article instead. But what is particularly interesting are the differences which indicate a ""change of perspective"", namely a different kind of article than in the original text. Our conclusion is that the noun can have several characteristics at the same time (description or determination by complement, generic use or absence of specific referent etc.) of which the author (or the translator) chooses the one to highlight. Likewise, we have underlined the role of article zero, which can carry different values (unspecified referent, but also unspecified quantity or even definite article value if the noun is introduced by a preposition), depending on its relationship to other articles in the language.

The Interplay of Motivational Goals and Cognitive Strategies in a New Pedagogical Culture

2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanna Järvelä ◽  
Hanna Salovaara
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Secondary School Students ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Strategies ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
Instructional Setting ◽  
School Students ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Pedagogical Culture

This article describes the results of an analysis of three years' process-oriented interview data concerning secondary school students' goals and learning strategies in computer-supported collaborative inquiries. Specifically, the changes in students' goal interpretations and the situational dynamics of students' goals and strategies were investigated over 3 years. By examining how these secondary school students (N = 18, from ages 13-15 years) interpret and explain different situations in a new instructional setting, we were able to determine their subjective and context-specific explanations of the situation. The interview data were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis, and nonparametric statistics were then used to authenticate some of the qualitative findings. The data show how the students' explanations and interpretations of their goals and strategies vary during different years of the study. It can be concluded that the students seem to develop both individual and contextual goals, as well as strategies, to self-regulate in the new pedagogical culture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document