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Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural is the property of Sociedad Espanola para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It is a well-established fact that pronominal constructions are one of the most difficult areas for learners of Spanish as a second language (Tremblay, 2006, Toth, 2000). This study aims to contribute to the area of language learning and materials design by drawing a general picture of the production of pronominal constructions applying corpus linguistics methodology, following the recommendations of Zyzick (2006). The analysis has been carried out taking into consideration three aspects: the students' L1, the semantics of each construction, and the type of errors found. In order to conduct our study, a corpus of 2,532 real pronominal sentences (written by learners of Spanish from levels B1 and C1) was compiled. Findings show that students with a Romance L1 do not perform better than students with a non-Romance L1. Also, the semantics of the different types of pronominal constructions seem to have an influence on the students' performance. Finally, errors of overgeneralization are more common than errors of omission. In addition, the latter decrease in higher levels whereas the former seem to increase. These results may be used to reconsider some aspects of the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the annotation scheme of constructions at the argument-structure level in the Spanish and Catalan Corpora SenSem. Constructions are accounted for as form-meaning pairs following the theoretical underpinning of Construction Grammar. Regarding meaning, we propose a hierarchy of constructions taking into account, at the highest level, the prominence of the logical subject in the sentence. Thus, we differentiate between topicalized and detopicalized sentences, which is an innovative proposal to solve some terminological issues related to pronominal constructions in Spanish. We further develop this classification taking into account the semantic relation of the logical subject with the verb and its coindexation, if any, with other participants. As regards form, the basic features we consider are syntagmatic categories and syntactic functions. Furthermore, we annotate the form the verb requires, that is, if it requires a pronoun in order to convey a particular meaning. Other relevant contributions are the annotation of some linguistic phenomena not taken into account in other similar resources, such as reciprocal, dative or impersonal constructions. Finally, we present the frequencies of all these constructions in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the annotation scheme used in the SenSem corpora (SSC), for Spanish and Catalan, to codify information regarding aspectuality, modality, polarity and factuality. As regards aspectuality, the most relevant contribution is the codification of information about dynamicity, telicity and iterativity. Regarding factuality, we present a more fine-grained annotation of uncertainty as applied to the identification of impossible events, completely uncertain events and neutral uncertain events. Although information about factuality in Spanish has been provided elsewhere, the Catalan SSC is the only corpus to do so for Catalan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]