Lagunas léxicas chinas en el español y sus estrategias traductológicas

Abstracta Por las enormes heterogeneidades tanto lingüísticas como culturales entre el chino y el español, es normal que existan numerosas lagunas léxicas chinas en el español y para las causadas por factores culturales se requieren diferentes estrategias traductológicas, o sea extranjerización y/o domesticación, de acuerdo con la finalidad de la traducción o la comunicación y los aprendientes chinos deben conocer las correspondientes técnicas para fomentar su competencia comunicativa e intercultural en español.

Spanish imperfect subjunctive form –se

This paper analyzes use of and linguistic attitudes toward the Spanish imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive –se form (e.g., tuviese ‘had’ and hubiese tenido ‘had had’, respectively). The study consists of two phases, P1 and P2. P1 is quantitative in nature and focuses on production of the form; P2 is qualitative in nature and centers on linguistic attitudes associated with –se. P1 data come from 24 Spanish speakers and a semi-controlled oral/written interview. P2 data are from 15 Spanish speakers and a questionnaire. Chi-square results were significant for nationality, i.e., Spaniards used the –se form significantly more than Latin Americans. Sex, modality (oral/written), syntactic context, and verb type were all found insignificant. Qualitative comments from P2 suggest an overall negative association with the –se form. A somewhat weak relationship between the form and Spanish nationality emerged from the Latin American cohort, but not strong enough to suggest a definitive stereotype.

Functionally-defined recurrent multi-word units in English-to-Polish translation

This study uses both parallel and comparable reference corpora in the English-Polish language pair to explore how translators deal with recurrent multi-word items performing specific discoursal functions. We also consider whether the observed tendencies overlap with those found in native texts, and the extent to which the discoursal functions realised by the multi-word items under scrutiny are “preserved” in translation. Capitalizing on findings from earlier research (Granger, 2014; Grabar & Lefer, 2015), we analyzed a pre-selected set of phrases signaling stance-taking and those functioning as textual, discourse-structuring devices originally found in the European Parliament proceedings corpus (Koehn, 2005) and included in the English-Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pęzik, 2016). Since our goal was to explore whether and to what extent English functionally-defined phrases reflect the same level of formulaicity and regularity in both Polish translations and native Polish texts, the findings provided insights into the translation tendencies of such items, and revealed – using inter-rater agreement metrics – that the discoursal functions of recurrent n-grams may change in translation.

El españolismo lingüístico en el alumnado madrileño de Bachillerato

Abstracta En este trabajo investigamos la ideología del españolismo lingüístico en una muestra representativa del alumnado de Bachillerato del municipio madrileño de Fuenlabrada. Mediante una técnica cuantitativa basada en cuestionarios anónimos, extraemos y analizamos las percepciones que a este grupo poblacional le sugiere la diversidad lingüística de España. Las personas participantes han asignado propiedades extralingüísticas al gallego, euskera, catalán y castellano como si de características inherentes a las lenguas se tratase. Asimismo, se han presentado estas lenguas para evaluarlas desde una perspectiva sociolingüística, de manera que se detectan diferencias sustanciales entre las lenguas en diferentes dominios sociales, así como prejuicios hacia los hablantes de cada una de ellas. Bajo esta carga valorativa se encierran diferentes premisas propias de la ideología del nacionalismo lingüístico español, que, a través de un discurso supremacista, emplaza al castellano en una posición preferente con respecto a otras lenguas de España y presenta a estas como lenguas menos aptas para la comunicación y como obstáculos para el desarrollo económico.

Interclausal relations with Old English verbs of inaction

The aim of this article is to analyse the syntactic and semantic interclausal relations that hold with Old English verbs of inaction. These verbs are studied from the perspective of juncture-nexus relations and the semantic relations Phase, Psych-action and Causative. The results are compared on the grounds of the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy. The comparison of semantic content and syntactic expression evidences discrepancies between too weak juncture-nexus types, such as clausal subordination, and very close semantic relations, like Phase. Two main conclusions are drawn. Firstly, the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy allows us to describe the variation in the complementation of inaction verbs in Old English; and to make predictions on the diachronic axis, given that the loss of finite clause complementation and the change to infinitival complementation presented by Present-Day English verbs of inaction are fully predicted by the IRH. Secondly, semantic relations and nexus types remain stable throughout the change, whereas juncture levels change.

Estudiantes de ELE en el ámbito universitario de la Economía

Resumen Con el objetivo de crear en los estudiantes de español de la Universidad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales de Viena (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) una conciencia sobre sus preferencias y modos de aprender y promover así su autonomía, se realizó un estudio para establecer sus perfiles de aprendizaje. Para ello, se adaptó al alemán el cuestionario CHAEA (Alonso et al., 1994) y se diseñó una encuesta digital. Tras una fase de pilotaje, un panel de cinco expertos revisó la traducción al alemán. En la recogida de datos se consiguió una muestra altamente significativa: 198 de un total de 744 estudiantes (26,6%). Los resultados muestran que entre los estudiantes de empresariales predominan básicamente dos perfiles de aprendizaje opuestos: la correlación de los estilos reflexivo-teórico y la correlación activo-pragmático. Esta dicotomía contrasta con los resultados de otras poblaciones y apunta a que los aprendientes podrían obtener beneficio de cualquier situación de aprendizaje, puesto que poseen estrategias de todos los estilos de aprendizaje.

Adjectival and verbal agreement in the oral production of early and late bilinguals

Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors favored the early bilinguals, enhancing their advantages over L2 learners. Findings suggest that the integrated knowledge and automatic access needed for native-like attainment in agreement behavior in extended oral production is more easily achievable by early than by late bilinguals.

Form-function dialectics in the analysis of irony in political discourse

In this paper, I analyze the construction of the trope of irony in a political interview, more specifically the interview with a Spanish politician on television in 2013. Its context is the emergence of the 15M, a citizen’s protest movement against the cuts imposed by the European Union and the Spanish Government. From a theoretical-methodological point of view, I adopt a holistic perspective, inspired by Halliday’s approach of jointly analysing the form-function relationship and White’s constructivism. I also review the different definitions and explanations of irony. After analysing the formal resources that construct irony, I give an account of the cognitive frameworks that are opposed in this discourse, and finally describe their narrative disposition and the communicative functions that those resources fulfill.

Authoring support for Spanish language writers

Authoring support consists of (semi)automated aids to be used at different stages during the writing process. Language information, however, tends to be restricted to areas such as spelling and grammar checking or term banks, and text construction difficulties that writers face concerning the structure of particular genres, associated sentence formulations or genre-specific vocabulary have not received proper attention. An additional gap in the research is that this support is generally addressed to English language users. This paper addresses these concerns focusing on a particular genre: the company’s directors’ report, and on Spanish language writers writing in English. A custom-made monolingual corpus has been analyzed using Bhatia (1993, 2004) and Swales (1990, 2004) definitions of genre and move combined with theme characterization. Recurrent strings for each move/step, which are conventionally associated with each rhetorical unit, were identified and formulated as “meta-strings.” The bilingual glossary includes domain-specific items as well as move/step or genre-specific lexical and phraseological options, i.e., elements used irrespective of the business, places or people involved. The results are valuable by themselves, as an analysis of the genre, but also as the empirical basis for the authoring support tool that we present here, and as language training materials.