Spanish in Context - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2013

Enfocándose en las redes sociales de once hablantes del centro-norte de España, este trabajo analiza la reducción de (s) implosiva en función del dialecto del interlocutor. Pese a la tendencia conservadora general, un análisis multivariante revela que el tiempo prolongado fuera de España, el alto contacto social con variedades reductoras y el origen del interlocutor son factores que inciden en la reducción de (s). Este resultado es consistente con el modelo de contacto dialectal por el cual la difusión de innovaciones se potencia en la acomodación entre individuos cuyos lazos con la comunidad de origen se han debilitado. Además del efecto de la intensidad y duración del contacto, los resultados muestran el papel de las actitudes en favorecer o cohibir los desarrollos lingüísticos esperados en el contacto multidialectal.

Se estudia una estructura del español conocida como Dislocación a la Derecha (LA conozco yo, esa pieza), formada por una cláusula/comentario (La conozco yo) y un constituyente TÓPICO situado a su derecha (esa pieza). En la cláusula/comentario hay un elemento correferencial con el tópico (La), denominado copia. En la investigación, basada en un corpus del español literario, se describen: (i) las características de la copia; (ii) las características del tópico; (iii) el funcionamiento de la Dislocación a la Derecha en el discurso. Los resultados indican lo siguiente: (i) la copia es un elemento catafórico anunciador del tópico; ambos constituyentes ofrecen las mismas marcas funcionales; (ii) lo más frecuente, por un lado, es que la copia sea un clítico que funciona como complemento directo y, por el otro, que el tópico sea una frase nominal léxica que transmite información evocada; (iii) la Dislocación a la Derecha parece cumplir tres funciones discursivas: esclarecedora (la más importante), indicadora del tópico del discurso y evaluativa.

This study provides an in-depth examination of the opportunities for social interaction and second language (L2) use in service encounters recorded in situ by study abroad students in Toledo, Spain. The participants in the study were seven university students from the U.S. who recorded 113 naturally-occurring service encounters over the course of one semester studying abroad. An analysis of the corpus and of students’ journals and interviews indicated that while many of the encounters were brief, students did use the L2 to meet their needs as consumers and attended to language form while speaking the L2. In small talk episodes, there were opportunities for brief conversations and instances of orientation by participants to language and culture learning. Thus, the results suggest that although service encounters are typically brief, they can contribute to the immersion experience of study abroad.

This article analyses the role of language in the intra- and intergenerational social mobility of Argentinean, Colombian and Moroccan immigrants in Catalonia, an officially bilingual society. We start from the notion that the knowledge and use of and attachment to local languages are affected by the range and importance of opportunities for social mobility offered by the host society. Empirical evidence is based on 45 biographical interviews with members of first generation immigrant groups and their children (raised in Catalonia and currently living outside the family home). We show that the attitudes towards and use of the Catalan language depend on expectations and constraints with regard to upward social mobility. This article questions the causal relationship between languages spoken and job opportunities, postulated by means of the theory of human capital whereby language is only considered as a competitive advantage on the basis of its communicative value.

This article examines the occurrence of variant forms of Spanish light verb constructions (LVCs) in a seven-million-word corpus of contemporary newspaper texts from seven Latin American countries. The findings from this corpus are compared with results from a previous study using a corpus of scholarly writing; additional information from a diachronic perspective is provided by data from the Corpus del Español. The structures selected for discussion are complex LVCs (e.g., tener un vínculo o relación), and tokens containing calques (e.g., dar un clic), loan words (e.g., tener un look) and affixes (e.g., dar goplecitos). This study provides evidence of the creative and expressive potential of less frequent types of these formulaic structures. While tokens containing calques and loan words appear almost exclusively in the newspaper corpus, complex LVCs appear with comparable frequency in both corpora. The discussion of the morphosyntactic features of these variant LVC types is accompanied by examples extracted from the corpus.