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This paper intends to explore the grammatical properties and meaning of pseudo-coordinative structures, as agarra y les paga or va y se muere, registered in different colloquial varieties of Spanish speaking countries. Pseudo-coordination produces grammaticalized constructions of two verbal forms inflected on the same morphological categories and united by the conjuction y, which denotate a unique event, since the first verb is desemantized or grammaticalized. A relevant fact is that the same grammaticalized verbs intervening on pseudo-coordinative structures (besides ir and agarrar, venir, coger, pillar, saltar and llegar, and the more novel volver, arrancar, largarse, lanzarse, ponerse, meterse, mandarse) function (or functioned) as periphrastic auxiliary verbs, often with an inchoative or ingressive meaning. Empirically, the paper concentrates on determine the grammatical distribution of pseudocoordinative structures, differentiating them to inchoative periphrasis, in order to offer a consistent syntactic and semantic analysis of these constructions. This will lead us to conclude that the primary meaning of grammaticalized pseudo-coordinative structures is aorist aspect (Smith, 1991; Camus Bergareche, 2004), in the same lines as Coseriu (1966) and in opposition to recent perspectives, as García Sánchez (2007) and Jaque et al. (2018, 2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional tokenization methods using linguistic rules have been replaced by statistical segmentation algorithms. Although these algorithms show a higher efficiency and are capable of building subword vocabularies from large corpora without human supervision, these subwords do not consistently correspond to morphemes. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an evaluation methodology and applying it to the morphological quality of Spanish vocabularies produced by three prominent subword tokenization algorithms –BPE, WordPiece, and Unigram– commonly used in Large Language Models (LLMs). Three gold standards were created to measure relevance, coherence, and morphological accuracy of vocabularies of six tokenizers trained on Spanish corpus, exploring different vocabulary sizes. Evaluation results indicate that none of the three algorithms is suitable for accurately representing Spanish morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociolinguistic typology studies have uncovered diverse social, cultural, and political factors that might account for aspects of the structural complexity of the world’s languages. Accordingly, the languages spoken by close-knit (or esoteric) societies tend to feature more complex phonologies and morphologies, as well as increased semantic opacity. By contrast, the languages spoken by open (or exoteric) societies usually exhibit more syntactic complexity together with greater semantic compositionality. In this paper, we support the view that classical (i.e. variationist) sociolinguistics would benefit from applying this typological approach to the study of intralinguistic variation. Specifically, we argue for relying on the concepts of esotericity and exotericity for achieving a better characterization and understanding of Spanish familects (i.e. the private language varieties used within families). We advance a specific protocol for studying this linguistic variety, as well as a tentative list of features characterizing Spanish familects, which we have posited under the view that familects are esoteric varieties of the standard language, although with some distinctive features compared to the oral vernacular, particularly to informal speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Applied Cognitive Linguistics, more specifically on how the different areas within this theoretical perspective contributed to the field of the acquisition and teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). Cognitive Linguistics is not a homogeneous approach to language; it includes different perspectives about language that share some theoretical principles, such as the integration of language with other cognitive abilities. In SFL, Cognitive Grammar has received most of the researchers’ attention but the interest in other areas of Cognitive Linguistics is now growing. The main benefits of applying Cognitive Linguistics to SFL teaching are explained in this paper. The focus is on typological contrasts in the area of motion events (e.g. ir ‘go’ vs. venir ‘come’; dejar ‘leave’/poner ‘put on’/meter ‘put in’) and the difficulties they pose to SFL students. Finally, it is explained how Cognitive Linguistics helps with the new challenges of the acquisition and teaching of SFL, particularly in relation to typological contrasts. For ex*ample, the development of mediation and plurilingual competence through the lens of Cognitive Linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses the translation of motion events from Spanish novels into German and English. More precisely, it focuses on three translation agents: translation students, professional translators and the neural machine translation tool DeepL. The study, contextualised in the Thinking-for-translating hypothesis (Slobin, 1997, 2000, 2003), aims at investigating whether all the information about the motion events in Spanish novels is transferred or otherwise Manner information is added, as might be expected due to intertypological differences (German and English languages are satellite-framed languages and Spanish is a verb-framed language, Talmy, 1985, 2000) and the data obtained from studies based on professional translation (cf. Slobin, 1996; Cifuentes-Férez, 2013; Molés- Cases, 2019). Overall, the results show that the way students and professionals deal with the translation of motion events is influenced by their mother tongues. However, it seems that, in general, students are more reluctant to add information about Manner in motion events than professional translators. Besides, the most observed translation technique in the case of DeepL corresponds to literal translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous study, we verified the advantages of learning a set of idiomatic phrases in Spanish through two didactic proposals based on Cognitive Linguistics in which the participants reflected on the connection between the idioms’ literal reading and the idiomatic meaning retroactively (after receiving the meaning) or proactively (before discovering it) (Ureña Tormo et al., 2022). This paper focuses on the incorrect responses of the previous study and identifies four types of errors: a) interference with the meaning of another target idiom; b) literal meaning; c) meaning unrelated to the idiom; d) blank response. Among these, blank responses (d) predominate significantly, especially one week after learning the idioms, while confusion between phrases (a) decreases markedly over time. The results do not allow us to establish whether either of the two methodological proposals is more likely to cause or avoid a certain type of error. However, given that the pedagogical treatment based on reflecting on the literal-figurative link retroactively reports superior results, it is convenient to continue exploring its pedagogical potential, and to relate this to idioms with specific features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an insight on the centrality of two main paradigms of the current linguistic theory in the field of Spanish as a second/foreign language acquisition, and its operative role in teaching. Generative Grammar (GG) as well as Cognitive Grammar (CG) are mentalist models, however, its postulates on the connection between human cognition and non-native linguistic knowledge are, in many cases, opposite; therefore, these models imply different conceptions of a pedagogical grammar. Throughout the paper, it is taken into consideration the way in which they are antagonistic, but also how they can be complementary. Even though GC has been more popular in classroom teaching, current GG may have a relevant impact on the curriculum, as well as on the instruction, by presenting a greater predictive capacity to identify the learner’s difficulties in processing certain linguistic structures. Finally, other key notions on linguistic knowledge, processability, and input, regarding didactic intervention, are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the phenomena we dub «hyper-agreement»: number agreement between the main verb and an argument of the subordinate clause in biclausal structures (me gustan que los planes salgan bien, lit. ‘me like3pl that plans work out’). At an empirical level, it focuses on structures with dative experiencers required by a psych-verb and shows that hyper-agreement is possible with both finite and non-finite subordinate clauses. In light of these data, it is argued that Agree (Chomsky, 2000, 2001) must not violate the Single Case Constraint (Nevins, 2004). The analysis put forward combines this constraint with the hypothesis that person and number are independent Probes (Rigau, 1991, among others). This proposal accounts both for the unlocking effect on the subordinate clause and for the fact that the long-distance agreement is restricted to partial agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an in-depth morphosyntactic and semantic characterization of Spanish inequality comparatives by taking into account mainly synchronic and some diachronic data. This comprehensive study shows the need to adjust previous analyses of Spanish inequality comparatives. The architecture of these comparatives is shown to be determined by: (i) the size of the comparison standard (phrasal or clausal) and (ii) the type of link between the standard and the comparative cluster (coordination or dependency). Finally, the syntactic and semantic selection restrictions of the Spanish standard markers are defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present an account of the many professional opportunities that today’s society offers to philologists and linguists. Based on real stories –including mine– of people dedicated to linguistics and philology (some of them authentic influencers), I show how language has become a fundamental tool for digital media and technologies, and how its good use and analysis have become essential in many areas of both the business world and research, but also as part of the image of society in general. Among the many professional channels available to philologists of these times, it is possible to highlight the following: proofreader, linguistic advisor, content creator, community manager, forensic linguist or philologist 2.0 (that is, the one dedicated to all issues related to new technologies), not forgetting that of the teacher, a crucial position to train the people of the future. In all cases, the revolutionary possibilities offered by the new media allow professions to be exercised in a completely renewed and modernized manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the utility, validity and use of several grammatical notions, mostly syntactic. Our goal is to assess whether some frequent concepts of the language class in high school should be replaced by others that are generally unknown, and also whether the content currently given to some of them should be modified. We defend such a possibility, which we justify with the main argument that grammatical analyses must relate forms to meanings and favor the reflection of students on the unconscious knowledge that each speaker has of his or her own language, together with the use that speakers make of linguistic expressions. For expository reasons, we consider four types of grammatical notions: those that are both used and useful; those that are useful, but seldom applied; those that are usually applied, despite being of little use; and, finally, those that could be useful and that are rarely applied. We set out this discussion to defend the need to establish a stable terminology perimeter for high school language classes, mainly based on the recent Glosario de términos gramaticales (2019). We take this minimum terminological agreement to be a necessary condition to carry out that reflection, for which we have advocated in previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quick development of Linguistics during the 20th century has not fully reached high school in Spain. In this paper we present some linguistic concepts and ideas that could be taught at secondary school and that could in turn improve the teaching of Spanish as a first language, were they included in educational syllabuses. Firstly, the idea that language is a complex internal system that is part of our cognition and, if only because of this, worth studying. Secondly, the importance of a scientific approach to linguistic data: data organizing, hypothesis testing, generalizations making, etc. Lastly, the need to include Linguistics in school curricula, for the absence of this discipline may explain the ignorance that the public shows towards many issues related to linguistics that are part of our everyday life, such as dialects, bilingualism, language acquisition, etc., or its very own name,»linguistics», which tends to be interpreted as «the study of foreign languages» by non-academics. For these reasons, we also suggest that some contents and concepts related to both Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics be taught at high schools, thus included in the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we deal with two mentalist approaches to the study of language: the generative and the cognitive approaches. First, we put forward the assumptions of generative linguistics, which is focused on the formal study of computational properties of language; and, second, we compare them with those of the alternative program of cognitive linguistics, according to which language is not to be analyzed as a specific computational property of the human mind but rather as a capacity based on general cognition principles. After having presented the different theoretical foundations of both approaches, some meeting points between them are offered. The present work concludes with an appeal to the need to establish some bridges between different approaches that allow them to face the challenges currently posed by different advances in language sciences and cognitive science in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the properties and distribution of the forms ser and estar when combined with adjectival complements in copular sentences in Iberoromance languages. The paper sets a detailed data paradigm that brings into light several differences between Western Iberian Romance languages (Galician, Portuguese, Castilian) and Eastern ones (like Catalan). The explanation relies on the hypothesis developed in Gumiel-Molina, Moreno-Quibén and Pérez-Jiménez 2015a to account for the properties of the «copula + adjective» structure in Spanish. The specificities shown by Catalan can be explained if one auxiliary hypothesis is assumed: a process of linguistic change is taking place in Catalan so that two estar forms coexist synchronically. Moreover, it will be proposed that the form estar in Western Iberian languages underwent a grammaticalization process that accounts for the fact that the so-called «evidential use of estar» is fully extended in these languages, but not in Catalan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent literature, it is widely assumed that adjectival passives are stative, while verbal passives are eventive. Regarding Spanish, it is also mostly assumed that adjectival passives only come with estar (El edificio está bien construido, «The building is well built»), while verbal passives only come with ser (El edificio ya ha sido construido, «The building has already been built»). However, there is at least a group of verbs, that of subject experiencer psych verbs (SPEVs), which poses a serious problem to these generalizations, given that passives of SEPVs, although being unquestionably stative, are constructed with ser: Pedro es temido, «Pedro is feared». In this paper it is argued, that SEPV passives are not verbal, but adjectival, and that they take ser because they denote individual-level states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze El español en Paraguay by Manuel Alvar. We untangle from the Atlas those Americanisms that Spanish speakers do not know, and we compare them with the ones collected in both the Diccionario of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language, and the Diccionario de Americanismos from the same institution. In addition, we have compared those words with the ones collected in current Paraguayan dictionaries. The result is that unknown voices in Spain - or terms whose location is hard to define in lexicographical works - come to light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the disjoint reference effect in passive constructions with ser and estar 'to be', which consists in the impossibility of having a reflexive reading. I show, based on an empirical study undertaken with speakers of Peninsular Spanish, that said effect holds in passives with ser, but not with estar. I develop a theoretical proposal to account for the data. My study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the properties of passive participles with ser and estar in Spanish, as well as to the current study of verbal and adjectival passives in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]