(In)felicitous use of subjects in Greek and Spanish in monolingual and contact settings

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers and L2 speakers, were analysed to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun, expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were also found to be felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.

Copula Choice is Associated with Discourse Integration Skills in Spanish-Speaking Children

The present study investigates the relationship between discourse integration skills and Spanish copula choice in monolingual Chilean Spanish-speaking children. Previous research has focused on determining the age at which children associate estar to a transitory property and ser to an inherent property (Holtheuer, Carolina. 2012. Spanish-speaking children do not always overuse estar. Revista Signos 45(78). 3–19, Holtheuer, Carolina & Johanna Rendle-Short. 2013. Ser and estar: Corrective input to children’s errors of the Spanish copula verbs. First Language 33(2). 155–167, Schmitt, Cristina & Karen Miller. 2007. Making discourse dependent decisions: The case of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish. Lingua 117(11). 1907–1929, Sera, Maria. 1992. To be or to be: Use and acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Journal of Memory and Language 31. 408–427, Requena, Pablo, Astrid Román-Hernández & Karen Miller. 2015. Children’s knowledge of the Spanish copulas ser and estar with novel adjectives. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 22. 193–207), showing that by 2 years of age children know the categorial distribution of the two copulas, but that at 5 years of age only some children, but not all children, have knowledge of the transitory/inherent distinction that often arises when the same adjective occurs with one or the other copula. The present study seeks to extend the latter research by further investigating the factors that might influence why only some children associate estar to transitory properties at 5 years of age, a question that will not only shed light on when the subtle meaning differences of the copulas are acquired, but also how they are acquired. Maienborn, Claudia (2005. A discourse-based account of Spanish ser/estar. Linguistics 43(1). 155–180) notes that estar is discourse-linked, while ser is not. Specifically, the use of estar with an adjectival predicate to compare changes to a person across different stages of their life relies on one’s ability to integrate the larger discourse (i.e., these various stages) into their statement. In the present study, to determine whether Spanish-speaking children’s production of the copula estar with adjectival predicates was associated with their discourse integration abilities, children were presented with both a Copula Elicitation Task and a Discourse Production Task. Analyses revealed an association between children’s discourse integration skills and their use of estar with adjectives to express transitory properties, a finding that indicates that children’s acquisition of estar is mastered late – at least in part because of their late development of discourse integration skills more generally. Most studies on the acquisition of estar with adjectival complements have focused primarily on comprehension. Experimental studies on children’s production of estar are rare. As such, this experimental study is one of the few that examines children’s use of estar in production and the first, as far as we know, that provides empirical support for the link between discourse integration skills in children and their use of estar with adjectival predicates.

Perception of the bilabial-labiodental contrast in the approximant consonants of the Chilean Spanish

Until recently, the consensus was that labiodental realizations of Spanish /b/ did not exist, and that consequently this variation in place of articulation could be safely disregarded. However, new evidence emerged showing that labiodental variants of /b/ do exist in relatively high numbers, at least in some dialects such as in Chilean Spanish. This study set out to determine whether Chilean Spanish listeners are able to perceive the differences between bilabial and labiodental approximant variants of Spanish /b/ (i.e., [β̞] versus [ʋ]). In order to test this, natural and synthetic stimuli were presented to 31 native listeners in identification and discrimination tasks. Results showed that, while the identification task with natural stimuli provided mixed evidence of sensitivity to the contrast, the identification and discrimination tasks with synthetic stimuli provided no evidence of listeners perceiving the phonetic contrast categorically. In sum, listeners do no seem able to perceive the acoustic differences between the two segments, and thus it is unlikely that this phonetic contrast could be employed to encode sociolinguistic information.

Cultural adaptation and reliability of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System to Chilean Spanish

Objective: The International Skin Tear Advisory Panel (ISTAP) created the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System with the aim of promoting a common and universal language to describe, classify and document skin tears, and increase awareness of the high prevalence of these wounds. Although there is a Spanish version of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System, the authors considered it relevant to have a specific Chilean Spanish version. The aim was to achieve the cultural adaptation of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System to Chilean Spanish, and verify its content validity and inter-rater reliability. Method: The study consisted of two phases: cultural adaptation of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System into Chilean Spanish, and validation of the culturally adapted system. A convenience sample of 150 health professionals classified 30 photographs of skin tears, using the same photographs used in the original ISTAP skin tear classification and validation study. Additionally, the clinical application of the classification system was tested among 20 nurses, who assessed and classified the skin tears (n=24) of hospitalised patients. For analysis of the inter-rater reliability, Fleiss' kappa was used. Results: The differences found in the translation referred to a synonym of the terms ‘skin’ or ‘cutaneous’, and the terms ‘flap’ or ‘tear’. Once analysed and discussed, the term ‘desgarro’ was maintained, which is the translation of the English term ‘flap’. There is no equivalent term for ‘skin tears’ in Spanish, but consensus was reached by researchers and collaborators to use the phrase: ‘desgarro de piel’. Once a consensus was reached on the wording for the translation, back-translation was completed and compared with the original English version and reviewed by the original author of the classification for accuracy. The content validity of the translated version of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System into Chilean Spanish showed a moderate agreement for the non-specialised nurses' group (0.4804) and for the specialised nurses' group (0.5308). Inter-rater reliability was achieved by obtaining a moderate agreement (Fleiss' kappa=0.53) and an almost perfect level of agreement for clinical application (Fleiss' kappa=0.83). Conclusion: The reported content validity and inter-rater reliability support the applicability of the cultural adaptation of the ISTAP Skin Tear Classification System to Chilean Spanish into practice.

Non-convergent boundaries and action ascription in multimodal interaction

Without units, there are no boundaries; and without boundaries, there are no units. Traditional linguistics takes units such as sentences and intonation phrases for granted, treating them as static. Interactional linguistics has reconfigured many of these units, treating them as emergent, focusing on their evolution in time, and how they implement social actions. A productive line of research of interactional linguistics has been this tension between conventional linguistic units and units of (and for) interaction (Reed and Beatrice 2013; Ogden and Walker 2013). The cesura approach (Barth-Weingarten 2016) focuses on the constitution of phonetic-prosodic discontinuities, which give rise to boundaries, “cesuras”, which it treats as a continuum from “no cesura” through “candidate cesuras” of various strengths, to “full cesuras”. However, there are also elements of spoken interaction whose unit-hood is not obvious at all levels of description; and it is a subset of these that form the focus of this article. We illustrate this with extracts of multimodal talk where two interactants taste and assess unfamiliar food and produce the token “mm”. We show how the alignment (and non-alignment) of boundaries of sequential, prosodic, gestural, lexical, and syntactic units can be a semiotic resource. Data are obtained from Chilean Spanish.

Priming as a Diagnostic of Grammatical Constructions: Second-Person Singular in Chilean Spanish

Structural priming has been described as a measure of association between constructions. Here, we apply priming as a diagnostic to assess the status of the Chilean second-person singular (2sg) voseo, which exists in variation with the more standard tuteo. Despite being the majority variant in informal interactions, Chileans are reported to have little metalinguistic awareness of voseo and they avoid the vos pronoun, in some cases using the tú pronoun with voseo verb forms, leading to proposals that tuteo and voseo are conflated into a single mixed form. The patterning for priming, however, indicates otherwise. Analyses of some 2000 2sg familiar tokens from a corpus of conversational Chilean Spanish reveal that a previous tuteo or voseo favors the repetition of that same form, indicating that speakers do treat these forms as distinct. We also observe that invariable forms with historically tuteo morphology are associated with neither voseo nor tuteo, while the invariable voseo discourse marker cachái ‘you know’ retains a weak association with voseo. Furthermore, while tuteo is favored with a tú subject pronoun, this effect does not override the priming effect, evidence that, even with a tú pronoun, voseo and tuteo are distinct constructions in speakers’ representations.