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The aim of this paper is to present the social and stylistic variation in the speech prosody of the Spanish of Mérida, Yucatán. Assertive utterances from sociolinguistic interviews and discourse completion tasks are analyzed considering the social variables of age, gender and educational level. The prosodic analysis is carried out within the Autosegmental Metrical model (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008) and with the Sp_ToBI labeling conventions (Hualde & Prieto 2015). The results show that this variety of Spanish is characterized by a prominent descent starting from the first tonal peak, the early-peak alignment in some prenuclear positions, and the presence of some non-falling boundary tones. The social and stylistic variation suggests that the last two are features that indicate vernacularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical agreement, a property of inflectional languages such as Spanish, consists of a formal association of different syntactic constituents. Even though it is a categorical morphosyntactic phenomenon, in Peruvian Spanish non-agreement occurs in different communicative contexts, due to certain social factors that will be analyzed in this paper. Based on a variationist perspective, we intend to identify and analyze non-concordant (NC) utterances extracted from the PRESEEA-LIMA corpus (directed by the author) in several linguistic contexts related to the constituents of noun phrases and verb phrases. An overview of the quantitative results will be provided in this paper. Moreover, we will approach data from both a heuristic and a hermeneutic point of view, through a reinterpretation of the role of quantitative value in the determination of linguistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passivization in Spanish takes (active) clauses with a direct object and turns them into (passive) clauses in which that argument behaves as a subject. English allows secondary passives as well, in which the constituent that is promoted to the subject position is the goal or beneficiary argument of ditransitive predicates such as give: Peter was given a book. Although Spanish does not have this kind of passives, this paper discusses some data on ditransitive verbs whose passives allow the promotion of goal or beneficiary arguments. It is shown that there are at least two major types with differentiated characteristics: verbs that enable a construction we call beneficiary accusative and verbs that trigger what we call lexicalized goal-passives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the information structure of predicate doubling in Rioplatense Spanish (e.g., Leer, leyó 'as for reading, she/he read'). We propose that in this construction the dislocated predicate functions as a contrastive topic in the sense of Büring (2003), that is, it evokes a set of alternative questions with which it contrasts. We argue that this characterization explains the "continuation effect" that predicate doubling exhibits, i.e., the fact that a predicate doubling sentence suggests a potential continuation that involves another predicate. Moreover, we show that this analysis correctly predicts the distribution of predicate doubling in embedding contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses concessive resources with a mitigating function which are found in argumentative acts in the PRESEEA corpus from Santiago, Chile. Based on data from 36 semi-structured interviews, the behaviour of concessive-oppositional moves and concessive discourse particles in argumentative acts is analyzed, and their sociolinguistic variation is described in relation to the speakers' gender, age and level of education. The key findings highlight that in Chilean Spanish there are at least 12 strategies that fulfill a mitigating concessive function, among which "sí, pero (yes, but) + negation", "aunque (even though)", "no, pero (no, but) + assertion" and "a pesar (de) que (despite the fact that)" stand out. These strategies are linked to the functions of self-protection and face prevention in the development of the argumentative act. Furthermore, it is also observed that the variation is mostly due to the subject's age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word formation in Spanish, mainly by affixation, shows a mostly concatenative behavior in which the relationships of form and meaning are established linearly. However, there are many cases that cannot be described based on the recurrent attachment of affixes. These formations have long been identified, but they have not been studied in detail, since the type of analysis that prevails in approaches to the lexical morphology of Spanish cannot fully account for morphological relationships of this type. One of these non-concatenative correspondences is the one established between pairs of suffixes that correlate at the level of meaning but not at a formal level, such is the case of the suffixes -ismo and -ista (comunismo, comunista), probably the best-known case of this type of derivation. In this research we will analyze this type of word-formation scheme starting from the concept of solidarity, proposed by Beniers (1996). We will study four productive solidarity schemes from Mexican Spanish, all of them suffixal. In addition to the afore mentioned -ismo, -ista, we will analyze -ero, -ería; -nte, -ncia and -azo, -iza. As we will see, the solidarity scheme allows us to describe in detail the relationships that are stablished between each of these pairs of suffixes. In this paper we will first present the concept of solidarity, its background and the previous work that has been done based on this kind of analysis. Next, we will analyze each of these solidarities to establish their characteristics and constraints. Finally, we conclude that this type of analysis allows a more accurate and appropriate description of such non-concatenative word-formation schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses «El problema argentino de la lengua», an article published by Amado Alonso in 1932. To this end, we first analyze the type of theoretical and critical intervention that the author carries out; then, we consider it within a broader textual series that comprises a set of texts published between 1927, as Alonso becomes chair of the Institute of Philology of the University of Buenos Aires, and 1935, when he publishes the book El problema de la lengua en America, which includes a highly modified version of his 1932 work. We conclude that this article is an exceptional text in Alonso's linguistic production as a whole, and that this exceptionality can be interpreted as a sign of the process of theoretical reformulation that he underwent during the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]