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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 Lletres Asturianes is the property of Academia de la Llingua Asturiana 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.)

The neuter interrogative pronouns el qué and lo qué alternate with qué 'what' in conversational Spanish in certain contexts and types of wh-questions (e.g., – No me lo puedo creer – ¿No te puedes creer qué/el qué/lo qué?). This paper describes geographical, register and social variation in the use of el qué and lo qué and analyses the interpretive and distributional properties of these complex forms. Building on corpus data and speakers' judgements, it is shown that the form el qué is common to all Spanish dialects and is used in all registers and at all social levels, whereas lo qué is only found in Spain, Argentina and Uruguay: in Spain and Argentina, this form belongs to lower class people with little education and speakers in rural areas; in Uruguay, it does not have a social bias and occurs in both formal and informal situations. It is also argued that el qué and lo qué are used to indicate that the target of the question is identifiable in the context of utterance, and it is thus claimed that el and lo in el qué and lo qué are overt definiteness markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The counterargumentative connective tuttavia marks the disruption of a causal chain, as it introduces an unexpected conclusion that cancels the inferences obtained from the previous premise. Therefore, under normal conditions, tuttavia links two discourse members that are argumentatively clashing. On the contrary, if the discourse segments are cooriented, the premise is deemed insufficient from an argumentative point of view and it does not allow a counterargumentative reading. As a result, the utterance is considered incoherent. A self-paced reading experiment with eyetracking technology compared the processing costs generated by an utterance, in which tuttavia is inserted in a neuter argumentative schema. The utterance in which tuttavia was inserted forced the reader to process a countercausal relation between discourse segments that are argumentatively cooriented. As a result of the extremely high processing effort needed to understand the utterance, readers decided to abandon the processing, as they deemed it did not embed a pragmatically unacceptable assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the referential and connective functions of pronominal anaphoric encapsulation in Spanish L2 young learners’ texts. For this purpose, a contrastive study of Spanish neuter pronouns ello, esto, eso and aquello is carried out on four subcorpus (young and adult writers, learners and native writers). The study attends, on one hand, to the syntactic constructions in which the pronominal encapsulators are included and, on the other hand, to the discursive connections these constructions hold. The results do not show significant distinguishing features of young learners’ texts. They do show, instead, a decidedly overuse of pronominal encapsulators by young native writers, as well as more frequent constructions in the two groups of learners, who use, to a greater extent, the consecutive construction por eso and the attributive construction pronominal encapsulator + ser. Native writers, especially adults, use a greater variety of constructions, which allows them to establish more complex discourse connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its inherently complex formal and semantic nature within the grammatical gender system, the teaching of the Spanish neuter is generally confined to somewhat marginal explanations of its more basic referential uses. However, the neuter forms are frequent in all registers, can be found in different syntactic structures, and present less-familiar but equally important uses for communication. The main goal of this paper is to offer a comprehensive view of neuter expression in Spanish by analyzing its referential and distributional productivity. In addition to its familiar referential and distributional possibilities, other lesser-known uses and constructions, but equally common in colloquial speech, will be presented. Some meaning and functional extensions of the neuter forms are also analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Investigaciones Veterinarias del Peru is the property of Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) 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.)