Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA COLANTONI ◽  
JORGE GURLEKIAN

In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Stefan Knapik

Abstract The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Abbink ◽  
Lu Dong ◽  
Lingbo Huang

Communication is one of the most effective devices in promoting team cooperation. However, asymmetric communication sometimes breeds collusion and hurts team efficiency. Here, we present experimental evidence showing that excluding one member from team communication hurts team cooperation; the communicating partners collude in profit allocation against the excluded member, and the latter reacts by exerting less effort. Allowing the partners to reach out to the excluded member partially restores cooperation and fairness in profit allocation, but it does not stop the partners from talking behind that member’s back even when they could have talked publicly. The partners sometimes game the system by tricking the excluded member into contributing but then grabbing all profits for themselves. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.


Author(s):  
Lila Caimari

Keeping order in the city is the oldest of police duties. In the 1820s, the Policía de Buenos Aires adopted the image of a watchful eye as their emblem, placing the symbol on their medallions, badges, and letterhead. This institution “never slept.” Watching the city by day, watching it by night, the police attempted to give the appearance of being the ubiquitous eyes of authority. This chapter focuses on the crisis and subsequent resurrection of this ideal during the first decades of the twentieth century. It traces this history into the 1930s, when the police began using the new technologies—radios and patrol cars—that fundamentally altered methods of perceiving and collecting information on urban life.


Author(s):  
Lila Caimari

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.


PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-163
Author(s):  
William G. Acree

Between November 1879 and January 1880, the argentine author Eduardo Gutierrez published a serialized narrative of the life of Juan Moreira in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Patria Argentina. Titled simply Juan Moreira, the heroic tale of the real-life outlaw went like this: Moreira was a good gaucho gone bad, who fought to preserve his honor against the backdrop of modernizing forces that were transforming life in this part of South America. His string of crimes and ultimate downfall resulted from his unjust persecution by corrupt state officials. The success of the serial surpassed all expectations. The paper's sales skyrocketed, and the melodramatic narrative soon appeared in book form. Enterprising printers produced tens of thousands of authorized and pirated editions to sell in the Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay), making Juan Moreira a leading example of everyday reading for the region's rapidly growing literate population and one of Latin America's pre-twentieth-century bestsellers (Acree, Everyday Reading; Gutiérrez, The Gaucho Juan Moreira).


2019 ◽  
pp. 146-168
Author(s):  
Mark Healey

Buenos Aires began the twentieth century as a prosperous port drawing European immigrants to serve a booming export economy. It expanded outward from its core of urban power and prosperity through suburbanization, early on segregating slaughterhouse zones from sites of recreation for the comfortable. Mid-century industrialization drew workers to the peripheries—which became zones of labor politics and bases for active citizenship and Peronist power. Peronist economic and political power sustained an unequally shared prosperity past World War I. Then de-industrialization in times of population expansion accompanied by military dictatorship (1976-1983) and a new suburbanization to protect the wealthy brought the polarizing mix wealth and marginality, formality and informality faced earlier in other New World cities. Re-democratization failed to bring more shared prosperity—or an escape from repeated cycles of promise and crisis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 3904-3927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas C. Coffman ◽  
Alexander Gotthard-Real

Can an organization avoid blame for an unpopular action when an adviser advises it to do it? We present experimental evidence suggesting this is the case—advice to be selfish substantially decreases punishment of being selfish. Further, this result is true despite advisers’ misaligned incentives, known to all: Through a relational contract incentive, advisers are motivated to tell the decision makers what they want to hear. Through incentivized elicitations, we find suggestive evidence that advice moves punishment by affecting beliefs of how necessary the selfish action was. In follow-up treatments, however, we show advice does not decrease punishment solely through a beliefs channel. Advice not only changes beliefs about what happened, but also the perceived morality of it. Finally, in treatments in which advisers are available, the data suggest selfish decision makers act more selfishly. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Starosta Galante

This paper examines the actions of Italian immigrants in Buenos Aires and Montevideo to support Italy’s mobilisation during the First World War. It focuses on immigrant institutions that participated in activities including military recruitment and welfare collections to assist the Italian side. It also investigates ways Italian immigrants collaborated across the Río de la Plata to mobilise war-related resources. Through its analysis, this article narrows in on a neglected period of time in Italian immigration historiography and uncovers ways events in Italy might have affected immigrant behaviours. It explores the degree of integration that existed between these two communities and within a transnational immigrant network built around ‘Italian’ notions of belonging. More broadly, this paper illustrates the value of scholarly focus on periods of crisis in immigrant homelands. The study of such periods helps advance understandings of social relations within immigrant communities and the transnational networks in which immigrants are situated.


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