Spanish in Context - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2010

Este artículo analiza la tendencia de transferir las características de los registros del discurso oral al discurso académico en español cuando se les enseña a los migrantes puertorriqueños de retorno (MPRR) las características de los registros del discurso académico a través de la Comunicación Mediada por Computadora (la CMC). Puesto que los sitios Web en la CMC tienen exigencias psicolingüísticas y lingüísticas inherentes a la exposición gráfica del discurso, el artículo examina cómo estas propiedades electrónicas e interactivas obligan a los estudiantes MPRR a: (a) considerar la coherencia textual al mismo tiempo que el impacto inmediato sobre los lectores; (b) variar constantemente de los registros típicos del discurso oral a los registros del discurso académico; (c) pensar en las estructuras de las cláusulas y en la forma que éstas dan al discurso; (d) crear cláusulas interactivas, claras y sucintas; y (e) emplear la estructura y el contenido conceptual del discurso académico en sus sitios Web personales.

To express nominal possession, Spanish speakers use a linguistic variable with three variants: a possessive adjective, a definite article and periphrasis. This study explores the expression of possession in Barranquilla, Colombia examining data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with a socially stratified group of twenty informants. I conducted a series of statistical regression analyses for each variant testing ten linguistic and five social constraints. The results revealed that possessive adjectives and definite articles marking possession are almost evenly distributed. The expression of possession is conditioned by eight linguistic and two social constraints including distance between referent and possessive, semantic category, type of subject, speaker’s sex and social status/age. The results also suggest that the incursion of possessive periphrasis may constitute a manifestation of cyclicity, a crosslinguistic evolutionary process triggering internal syntactic and morphological adjustments. The results help increase our understanding of variation in contemporary Spanish and of how the sociolinguistic forces constraining language variation in Colombian Costeño Spanish conform to established sociolinguistic theory.

Este estudio analiza nuevos modelos de categorización etnosocial de cuatro grupos de migrantes1 multilingües en una localidad catalana semi-rural. Se investiga cómo los antiguos modos de identificación social en un enclave rural catalán se actualizan en las prácticas lingüísticas diarias cuando el extranjero ya no es solamente el castellano sino que está ahora formado por un ‘Otro’ que incluye la multiplicidad de nuevas identidades de los recién llegados y que se define, en el imaginario colectivo, como el no-catalanohablante. En primer lugar, se describen los procesos globalizadores que actualizan la política económica de la lengua en el área rural de Barcelona y las ideologías del habla de los actores sociales de la localidad. Se analizan también intercambios lingüísticos que ejemplifican dichos procesos de alteridad y la creación y mantenimiento de antiguas y nuevas barreras étnicas. Además, se exploran los nuevos significados que adquiere ahora la convergencia lingüística al castellano. Finalmente se vincula el habla no sólo con los procesos de categorización sino con la extranjerización y la exclusión social.

This comparative study of naturally occurring apologies in Cuernavaca and Panamanian Spanish investigates the apology strategies community members employ most often, and the types of positive- and negative-politeness strategies they use to perform this speech act. The authors calculate the frequency with which speakers use positive- and negative-politeness strategies in their apology acts and investigate whether members of these two speech communities demonstrate a preference for positive or negative politeness when apologizing. Instead of using a language-specific parameter such as “Spanish Language” and assuming that all native speakers of this language have and will use a closed set of linguistic strategies in the same way when they apologize, the authors argue that speech acts, politeness and face are socio-culturally sensitive variables whose values and effects vary between communities of practice. To support this claim, they show how the communities of Cuernavaca, Mexico and Panama City, Panama differ from previous findings on apologizing within different communities of practice in the Spanish-speaking world.

The border shared by Brazil and Uruguay represents a situation of sustained, intimate cultural and linguistic contact between Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Previous research on the bilingualism of this region has focused primarily on Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay ‘Portuguese Dialects of Uruguay’ (DPU) (Carvalho 1998, 2003a, 2003b; Elizaincín 1976, 1992a, 1992b; Elizaincín, Behares & Barrios 1987; Hensey 1971, 1972; Rona 1965). Surprisingly, however, the Spanish of Uruguay spoken along this border has never been extensively studied. The current research focuses on the role of sociolinguistic identity in the conditioning of language-specific variants of intervocalic /d/ in the Spanish of 63 bilinguals living in Rivera, Uruguay. Unlike in monolingual varieties of Spanish, in which intervocalic /d/ is realized as either a fricative or a phonetic zero, this phoneme is also variably realized as an occlusive in the bilingual Spanish of Rivera in accordance with Portuguese phonological norms. Perceptions of sociolinguistic identity within this speech community are based on four independent factor groups. These are: (1) frequency of language use, (2) language preference, (3) attitudes toward local Portuguese and (4) attitudes toward language mixing. Results from multivariate analysis reveal that Portuguese-dominant speakers tend to incorporate occlusive variants of intervocalic /d/ into their Spanish to a much greater extent than Spanish-dominant speakers. Conversely, the deletion of this consonant, which has garnered covert prestige within the community due to its association with non-border varieties of Spanish, is statistically favored among speakers who prefer this language. These results provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the ease of access of phonological exemplars from stored memory is greater for those encoding frequent, recent experiences (Pierrehumbert 2001). With regards to sociolinguistic attitudes, statistical analysis shows that speakers who have positive attitudes toward local Portuguese favor the use of occlusive variants, which serve as markers of Brazilian identity. Somewhat counter intuitively, speakers who have positive attitudes toward language mixing favor deletion. When these attitudes are cross-tabulated with speakers’ occupation, however, it becomes clear that only students have overwhelmingly positive attitudes toward language mixing. Not surprisingly, they are also the least conservative group in the community and lead the way for phonological change (Waltermire 2008).