Spanish in Context - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2009

Since the 1990s written academic genres have received considerable attention in discourse and rhetorical studies, especially texts written in English. Although few studies describe PhD theses as a genre, some work has been carried out on their macrostructure and the rhetorical moves of certain sections. In the Spanish literature, genre studies on academic writing are scarce relative to those in English, especially in the case of doctoral theses. We analyse the introductions of 21 doctoral theses in computing written in Spanish using Bunton’s model (2002) for thesis introductions in English. The results indicate that most of the steps in this model are applicable to our corpus, but several new steps and sub-steps have been distinguished to account for the observed moves of Spanish PhD thesis introductions. The complexity of the thesis introduction is related to the scope and depth of the research carried out for a doctoral thesis, the need to display extensive knowledge of the field and to justify the relevance of the research.

This study approaches Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic work on Dominican Spanish by situating it in the political context in which it emerged. Henríquez Ureña’s travels, work and publications encompass many parts of the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. Linguists have generally tended to descriptively review Henríquez Ureña’s contributions to Spanish American dialectology and have avoided any critical examination of the conditions of production of his linguistic work. My study attempts to fill this gap by conducting a critical examination of these works against the relevant political, cultural and intellectual historical currents of the period. Specifically, I apply the semiotic concepts of ‘iconization’ and ‘erasure’ which are instrumental in the analysis of ideological phenomena. Iconization and erasure are language ideological processes that link language to social behavior and linguistic forms to social images, while eliminating or omitting sociolinguistic complexity. After a discussion of the ways in which these semiotic strategies have been employed and interpreted by scholars, I demonstrate Henríquez Ureña’s own implementation of them. I show how his linguistic work is a discursive site where race and identity in the Dominican Republic are both constructed and debated.

This paper explores the role of Spanish in an academic community in Southwest Texas in order to demonstrate how power, history and place affect linguistic attitudes. The changing status of Spanish from being an index of low wage paying jobs to being a marker of membership in an exclusive academic community serves as a case to investigate how power relations and history interact to shape linguistic attitudes of individuals and groups. Members of the Bilingual Creative Writing Graduate Program at the University of Texas, El Paso, were interviewed to identify the prevalent attitudes towards bilingualism, Spanish in the community and Spanish language users. A discourse analysis of the interviews revealed that participants in this community value Spanish use and bilingualism in the academic context, but have mostly negative attitudes towards local varieties of Spanish and monolingual speakers. This study demonstrates the importance of history, power and place in understanding language attitudes as shared evaluations of language users and uses.

Este artículo analiza el léxico dialectal recogido en el diccionario de léxico disponible de Castilla-La Mancha desde un punto de vista sociolingüístico siguiendo modelos de trabajos anteriores y realizando nuevas aportaciones, como la inclusión en el análisis de un conjunto amplio de variables sociales (nivel sociocultural, sexo, tipo de centro educativo y ubicación), la ampliación de la consideración del fenómeno dialectal a través de los conceptos de amplitud y vitalidad de los términos y, finalmente, a través de la aplicación de análisis estadísticos para validar los resultados cuantitativos (t-Student y ANOVA).

This study examines twenty pear film narratives (Chafe 1980), produced by native speakers of Castilian Spanish, following the ‘frames/schema’ model used by Tannen and Wallat (1993) in their study of a medical examination/interview. By analyzing the narratives in terms of interactive frames (originally defined by Bateson 1954) and knowledge schemas, we can see how frames and schemas interact and how participants’ expectations influence framings. Using a discourse-analytical approach, I show how various linguistic elements in the discourse convey (implicitly or explicitly) the speakers’ framings (i.e. the activities they are participating in when speaking) and their expectations about the study itself, films, elements in the pear film and their perceived roles when speaking. Segments of the discourse can convey simultaneous (merged) framings or sequential framings. The analysis shows that in order to fully account for the discourse produced during the Spanish narrators’ retelling of the pear film, we must take into consideration the participants’ underlying knowledge schemas resulting from their cultural experiences living in a rural town in Spain, the influence of and assumptions about the situation in which they find themselves and about the activity they are participating in, and the fact that the narrative discourse is co-constructed as an interactive conversational activity with interlocutors who are family members or friends of the narrators.