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This paper aims at explaining the grammaticalization of igual (and lo mismo) as a reformulative and concessive marker based on a corpus of diachronic texts. The objectives are threefold: to find out the possible relation between the evolution of igual and that of lo mismo in this case, to investigate in what previous contexts the new functions were acquired and in which area they were originated. The corpus study reveals that the evolutions of both forms are related, but the change of formal preference (lo mismo > igual) caused that the grammaticalization of lo mismo as a connective failed and that of igual was successful. The exploration of the previous contexts reflects the link between the reformulative and concessive values. Finally, the process took place in Rio de la Plata area and from there it spread to the inside of Argentina and Chilean Spanish, where it became a popular form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of Buenos Aires City's inhabitants undergo serious housing difficulties. During the 21st century these difficulties have become more and more complex, to the point that the City's Legislature has systematically extended the state of housing emergency. In this context, the aim of this paper is to explain the deep causes and the social consequences involved in the housing issue, as it has a strong symbolic impact on the identities of those who undergo it. The theoretical frame for this work is Critical Discourse Analysis, its methodology is qualitative and the corpus consists of life histories and City's Government speeches on the so-called "housing issue". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, in the Cardiff model (Fawcett, 2000, 2008, 2011, forthcoming a, forthcoming b), we explore the transitivity system of communication processes in the economic media discourse in Spanish. In the Cardiff Grammar, verbal processes are conceived as a subset of mental processes of cognition and they have a configuration of three participant roles: Agent + Affected- Cognizant + Phenomenon. The participant role Agent gives information or knowledge to an Affected who, thereafter, becomes Cognizant, and so comes to know of some Phenomenon. It is assumed that these three roles are inherent in this process type, i.e., they are required at the level of meaning, even if they are covert and sometimes unrealized at the level of form (Fawcett, in preparation a, in preparation b). In this paper, we analyze a subset (50 texts) of a corpus called DIDIECO (Economic Media Discourse), built according to the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Biber, 1993; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; Parodi, 2010). In order to annotate the corpus, syntactic and semantic analysis were made, applying verification tests (Fawcett, 2011) for participants roles. Our main purposes are: (i) distinguish criteria to identify members of the class "communication process"; (ii) determine the frequency of instantiation of each verb in this kind of discourse; (iii) extend in delicacy the system network proposed by Fawcett, based on the concept of "lexis as most delicate grammar" (Halliday, 1961), and (iv) consider the diversity of verbs that realize communi- cation processes in the light of the discourse in which they are inserted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]