Morphological and Syntactical Variation and Change in Latin American Spanish

The Spanish language, as it spread throughout Latin America from the earliest colonial times until the present, has evolved a number of syntactic and morphological configurations that depart from the Iberian Peninsula inheritance. One of the tasks of Spanish variational studies is to search for the routes of evolution as well as for known or possible causal factors. In some instances, archaic elements no longer in use in Spain have been retained entirely or with modification in Latin America. One example is the use of the subject pronoun vos in many Latin American Spanish varieties. In Spain vos was once used to express the second-person plural (‘you-pl’) and was later replaced by the compound form vosotros, while in Latin America vos is always used in the singular (with several different verbal paradigms), in effect replacing or coexisting with tú. Other Latin American Spanish constructions reflect regional origins of Spanish settlers, for example, Caribbean questions of the type ¿Qué tú quieres? ‘What do you (sg)want?’ or subject + infinitive constructions such as antes de yo llegar ‘before I arrived’, which show traces of Galician and Canary Island heritage. In a similar fashion, diminutive suffixes based on -ico, found in much of the Caribbean, reflect dialects of Aragon and Murcia in Spain, but in Latin America this suffix is attached only to nouns whose final consonant is -t-. Contact with indigenous, creole, or immigrant languages provides another source of variation, for example, in the Andean region of South America, where bilingual Quechua–Spanish speakers often gravitate toward Object–Verb word order, or double negation in the Dominican Republic, which bears the imprint of Haitian creole. Other probably contact-influenced features found in Latin American Spanish include doubled and non-agreeing direct object clitics, null direct objects, use of gerunds instead of conjugated verbs, double possessives, partial or truncated noun-phrase pluralization, and diminutives in -ingo. Finally, some Latin American Spanish morphological and syntactic patterns appear to result from spontaneous innovation, for example, use of present subjunctive verbs in subordinate clauses combined with present-tense verbs in main clauses, use of ser as intensifier, and variation between lo and le for direct-object clitics. At the microdialectal level, even more variation can be found, as demographic shifts, recent immigration, and isolation come into play.

Algunas observaciones sobre el funcionamiento del adverbio dizque, un elemento de discontinuidad diacrónica y diatópica en español

Some Observations Regarding the Functioning of the Adverb dizque, an Element of Diachronic and Diatopic Discontinuity in Spanish. The adverb dizque lies at the core of a double discontinuity in the landscape of Spanish language. On the one hand, it marks a diachronic discontinuity, as its modal-epistemic and pragmatic values have developed significantly since the 13th century, when it was first registered in Old Spanish, with the evidential-reportative meaning that stems from its etymology. On the other hand, dizque is affected by a diatopic discontinuity, as it is becoming obsolete in the Iberian Peninsula, but is extremely productive in Hispanic American varieties. This paper traces the evolution of the modal and discursive values of dizque and observes its syntactic behaviour by means of a corpus analysis, concluding that, in today’s Hispanic American Spanish, this adverb has reinforced this position in the left periphery, either as a sentence modifier or as a constituent modifier, with clearly established syntactic peculiarities. Keywords: evidentiality, epistemic, syntax, pragmatics

Learner Development of a Morphosyntactic Feature in Argentina: The Case of vos

Students have been found to improve their sociolinguistic competence, particularly regarding the acquisition of dialectal features, while studying abroad. Nevertheless, most of the research on learner development of morphosyntactic features in Spanish-speaking immersion contexts has examined that of variants characteristic of Peninsular Spanish in Spain, namely clitics and the informal second-person plural vosotros. Since the informal second-person singular, vos, is more prevalent than its equivalent, tú, in several Latin American countries, learner acquisition of this feature also merits investigation. This article explores second-language learner production of vos among 23 English speakers during a 5-month semester in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a popular study abroad destination. The findings from the multivariate analysis of over 1200 tokens of tú and vos indicate that learners used vos verb forms over 70% of the time by the end of the sojourn. Factors including social networks, proficiency level, mood, and task significantly influenced this use. Most notably, the stronger the learners’ social networks, the more they used vos verb forms and learners with high proficiency levels used these forms more than lower-proficiency learners. This study provides one of the first accounts of the acquisition of a widespread morphosyntactic feature of Latin American Spanish.

A Language Model for Misogyny Detection in Latin American Spanish Driven by Multisource Feature Extraction and Transformers

Creating effective mechanisms to detect misogyny online automatically represents significant scientific and technological challenges. The complexity of recognizing misogyny through computer models lies in the fact that it is a subtle type of violence, it is not always explicitly aggressive, and it can even hide behind seemingly flattering words, jokes, parodies, and other expressions. Currently, it is even difficult to have an exact figure for the rate of misogynistic comments online because, unlike other types of violence, such as physical violence, these events are not registered by any statistical systems. This research contributes to the development of models for the automatic detection of misogynistic texts in Latin American Spanish and contributes to the design of data augmentation methodologies since the amount of data required for deep learning models is considerable.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Galinhas in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790–1820

In the early nineteenth century a centralized political entity, the Galinhas kingdom, emerged in southernmost Sierra Leone. Based on sources from Cuban, British, American, Spanish, and Sierra Leonean archives, this article examines the factors accounting for the emergence and consolidation of Galinhas. I argue that the postabolitionist (1808) redeployment of North Atlantic slave trading actors, networks, routes, and spaces, particularly the connection with Cuba and resources from the island, created the conditions for Galinhas's commercial growth and the centralization of its political power. I then problematize the relationship between warfare, the Atlantic slave trade, and state making. During the foundation of a predatory state, before a slaving and political frontier existed, wars were detrimental to trade. When warfare and commerce — or any social activity — coexisted in the same physical space, the interdependent balance between them, which supported the slave trade itself, was disrupted. After the end of the war, political stability boosted slave trading operations.

Spanish South American and Brazilian Demonyms: Morphosyntactic Structure and Axiological Values

This article contributes to the study of the grammar, semantics, expressive values of a very special onymic category, inhabitants names, or demonyms. The authors examine and compare demonyms in two varieties of Romanic languages - South American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese from both a multi-modal point of view and empirical evidence (synchronic and diachronic data) and systemize them by concentrating on their morphosyntactic distinctive features and semiotic content. The perspective revealed in this paper aims to study, define and analyze the main tendencies in the creation of denominative adjectives functioning as demonyms, to establish the parameters of discrepancies and convergences regarding demonyms of the region in question. The authors based on analyzing the motivation sources, grammar formulae, suffix combinations, socio-cultural varieties and the occurrence of homonymy, as well as their significance, axiological values in forming a group identity and the stereotypes they might lead to. The methodology has included semiotic, cognitive, historic and comparative analysis - a synchronic conceptual transdisciplinary analysis. The results of the study confirm the premise that the demonym suffixes randomly alternate in derivation processes, but also demonstrate the existence of other morphological and pragmatic trends while outlining the role of demonyms in migration processes, formation of a linguistic landscape and axiological values.

The Use of the Future Subjunctive in Colonial Spanish Texts: Evidence of Vitality or Demise?

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.

POST-DETENTION SOCIO-PROFESSIONAL REINTEGRATION OF THE DETAINEE BETWEEN THE THEORY AND REALITY OF THE XXI CENTURY

In a constantly changing society, it is mandatory for state institutions and society to be actively involved in the (re) integration of persons released from prison. The non-adaptation of policies and programs for the integration of these people with the real needs they had coming out of the prison gate and also in the first month of freedom, can determine them to relapse and implicitly to increase the crime rate at the societal level. It is necessary that the programs are inspired by institutions and specialists from other states, such as those of the American, Spanish, German state, etc. to be adapted to the real needs of the liberated people, to the culture and values of the Romanian people. Each person is unique, that’s why the person released from prison has certain needs to integrate into society again, and these needs are different from one person to another, depending on gender, religion, education, life experience, marital status, age, moral support provided by the family, support given by society the time they leave the penitentiary after serving the sentence, etc.