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Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we report a word-order selection task, with a Greek and a Spanish version. The two versions of the task were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Greek and Spanish. The results show that the first language (L1) Spanish learners of Greek approximated more closely native word orders than the L1 Greek learners of Spanish. For the Spanish learners of Greek, the advanced group performed at ceiling, while the intermediate group performed native-like only with unergatives in neutral and direct interrogative subject-focused contexts. On the other hand, for the Greek learners of Spanish, the intermediate group failed in all contexts, while the advanced group performed native-like with unaccusatives in neutral contexts. This asymmetry between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish reveals that the L1-L2 combination determines the learners' performance, and this is unexpected under the IH.

We evaluate the impact of gestures during the teaching of vocabulary in a foreign language (FL). Spanish speakers learned words in a FL in four gesture conditions according to the relationship between the meaning of the words and the gestures (congruent gestures, incongruent gestures, gestures without meaning, and no gestures). The participants learned the words by performing gestures ('do' teaching group) or by observing the gestures performed by others ('see' teaching group). Compared to the meaningless gesture condition, the processing of congruent gestures facilitated the recall of second language (L2) words in the 'see' and 'do' teaching groups. However, the interference effect associated with the processing of incongruent gestures was greater in the 'see' teaching group than in the 'do' teaching group. Thus, the performance of gestures seems to mitigate the negative impact that the use of gestures may have on the teaching of vocabulary in a foreign language.

Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A] has developed to a certain degree (Meisel, J. M. [2013]. Sensitive phases in successive language acquisition: "The Critical Period Hypothesis revisited." In C. Boeckx & K. Grohmann (Eds.), Handbook of biolinguistics (pp. 69-85). Cambridge University Press). Exposure to LB can take place early in childhood (eL2 learners, age 3;0) or starting with elementary school (cL2 learners, age 6;0). In this study, 34 participants were recruited from different Catalan-speaking regions and displayed different AoA-profiles (12 simultaneous, 13 eL2 and 9 cL2 learners) and different degrees of language dominance (17 balanced, 10 Spanish and 7 Catalan dominant). We conducted a Preference Task to examine Catalan copula selection in locative contexts with (non-)eventive subjects, since it may pattern differently in Catalan/Spanish: Both languages select "ésser/ser" for eventive subjects, non-eventive subjects take "estar" in Spanish but show variation in Catalan. Our study examines whether the factors AoA, language dominance or the speaker's linguistic variety determine copula selection. In a nutshell, all speakers preferred "ésser" with eventive subjects. For non-eventive subjects, the results show that language dominance and speaker's linguistic variety predict copula preference.

The current study investigates Spanish children's variation between the standard and non-standard forms for second person singular preterit --s ("caiste" [approximately equal to] "caístes"). All second person singular preterit forms were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 78 children in Spain and analyzed for the effects of age, language contact setting, and lexical frequency. Results show that children in contact with Galician and Catalan produce more non-standard than children in non-contact areas like Madrid. Meanwhile, low-frequency verbs (e.g., "pillaste") are more likely to occur with the non-standard --s than high-frequency verbs (e.g., "fuiste"). However, age is not a significant predictor of children's 2sg preterit production. These preliminary findings demonstrate that Spanish children do have the non-standard -s in their speech, and that their 2sg preterit forms are significantly conditioned by language contact and lexical frequency.

The ability to think about nonpresent time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now." They also intrinsically differ: The past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or differently? In this study, we addressed this question by investigating how Spanish speakers process past/future time reference violations during sentence processing, while recording eye movements. We also investigated the role of verbs (in isolation; within sentences) and adverbs (deictic; nondeictic) during time processing. Existing accounts propose that past processing, which requires a link to discourse, is more complex than future processing, which--like the present--is locally bound. Our findings show that past and future processing differs, especially at early stages of verb processing, but this difference is not limited to the presence/absence of discourse linking. We found earlier mismatch effects for past compared to future time reference in incongruous sentences, in line with previous studies. Interestingly, it took longer to categorize the past than the future tense when verbs were presented in isolation. However, it took longer to categorize the future than the past when verbs were presented in congruous sentences, arguably because the future implies alterable worlds. Finally, temporal adverbs were found to play an important role in reinspection and reanalysis triggered by the presence of undefined time frames (nondeictic adverbs) or incongruences (mismatching verbs).

Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn't interrupt this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically. Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation.

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before tested in this language. Spanish "parecer" is ambiguous between a functional verb, which does not select an experiencer argument, and a lexical verb, which requires an overt experiencer (e.g.. In the first part of this study, we consider the hypothesis that the experiencer argument of "seem" may induce intervention effects even when it is not overtly produced and find support for this claim--English-speaking children perform poorly on StSR both when the intervening experiencer is overtly expressed and when it is implicit; Spanish-speaking children, on the other hand, only perform poorly on StSR with lexical "parecer" but do well on StSR with functional "parecer." These results are in line with intervention accounts. The second part of this study aims to investigate whether these intervention effects are rooted in children's grammatical or processing deficits. Results from a verbal processing task suggest that for a group of children--those who perform at chance or above on the StSR task--comprehension of sentences with an intervening experiencer is modulated by processing capacity. However, for those who consistently obtain a non-adult-like interpretation of StSR, processing capacity does not positively correlate with their performance. We hypothesize that, for this group, the difficulty is instead grammar-based.

The study assesses the extent to which Spanish students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1+ level (CEFR) are able to communicate in English (target language) joy, sadness, fear, and anger emotions. It focuses on perception, by investigating learners' ability to recognise these emotions in a reading task, and production, by examining the linguistic resources used to conceptualise and express them in a written task. The participants, 99 undergraduate students, completed an online English questionnaire, including 20 emotionally-loaded hypothetical situations arousing joy, fear, anger, or sadness, and a reading and a writing task. Emotion perception was analysed in terms of percentage of students' agreement on identifying the main emotion in each scenario. As to production, emotion words, positive and negative emotion-laden words, expressive interjections, intensifiers, and syntactic devices were analysed to obtain common patterns of emotion conceptualisation and expression in English. The results revealed high percentages in students' ability to perceive emotions, a bias towards positive scenarios, and different strategies of emotion expression, one of the most common across categories being the preference for the adjectival pattern when describing feelings.

Two experiments examined the influence of verb tense on how abstractly people construe action representations. Experiment 1 revealed that written descriptions of several daily events using the simple past tense (vs. simple present tense) resulted in actions and the action's target being seen as less likely and less familiar, respectively. In Experiment 2 participants wrote about a personal episode of binge drinking (using the simple past tense vs. simple present tense), and the resulting narratives were coded using the Linguistic Category Model (see Semin & Fiedler, 1991). Results revealed that events were described at a more abstract level when texts were written using the simple past tense (vs. simple present tense). The results are discussed in the context of other effects of verb form and in relation to construal level of events.

Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and attempt to explore the reasons why the learners deviate from NS's norms. The analysis indicates that these learners tend to have problems with a set of sub-technical and high-frequency verbs. Deviant combinations involving these verbs are frequently the result of a deficient knowledge of the phraseology of academic and technical discourse. The unawareness of collocations that are typical of this discourse often leads students to create V+N combinations by relying on the "Open Choice Principle" (Sinclair, 1991) or by using patterns from their mother tongue. (Contains 3 notes and 2 tables.)

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the expression of motion events in these languages showed that Romance languages do not always follow the same pattern; for example, Italian tends to express the component of Path more frequently than French and Spanish. The results of the present study highlight evidence of intra-typological differences, even between languages that are genetically very close. These differences seem to lead speakers to produce cases of conceptual transfer into their second language, Spanish, even when their first language is another Romance language.

In this paper, we study the phenomenon of linguistic mudes or transformations in linguistic practices, in the case of highly proficient speakers of Irish, Basque and Catalan and we investigate the extent to which speakers in the three contexts share ideologies and experiences related to the process. Such an investigation will deepen understanding of the triggers behind the "mudes" and what it means to successfully become a new speaker of Irish, Basque or Catalan. This is necessary in order to develop a better understanding of how new speakers respond to the linguistic repertoires that they encounter in the various social milieus in which they navigate. The study relates to broader questions of policy towards the three languages in question: as all are operating within a revitalisation framework it is essential to understand the experiences of new speakers who have adopted the languages in order to guide future policy development.

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were morphological complexity and the presence of a verbal derivation or nominalizing suffix form. Results showed that nominalizations, such as "explosion," were harder to classify as a noun but easier to classify as a word when compared with monomorphemic words with similar actionlike semantics, such as "avalanche." These findings support the claim that listeners decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent units during processing. More specifically, the results suggest that people hold representations of base morphemes in the lexicon.

This study investigated the formulation of verb argument structure in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing age-matched controls. We compared how language production can be guided by conceptual factors, such as the organization of the entities participating in an event and knowledge regarding argument structure. Eleven children with SLI (aged 3;8 to 6;6) and eleven control children participated in an eye-tracking experiment in which participants had to describe events with different argument structure in the presence of visual scenes. Picture descriptions, latency time and eye movements were recorded and analyzed. The picture description results showed that the percentage of responses in which children with SLI substituted a non-target verb for the target verb was significantly different from that for the control group. Children with SLI made more omissions of obligatory arguments, especially of themes, as the verb argument complexity increased. Moreover, when the number of arguments of the verb increased, the children took more time to begin their descriptions, but no differences between groups were found. For verb type latency, all children were significantly faster to start describing one-argument events than two- and three-argument events. No differences in latency time were found between two- and three-argument events. There were no significant differences between the groups. Eye-movement showed that children with SLI looked less at the event zone than the age-matched controls during the first two seconds. These differences between the groups were significant for three-argument verbs, and only marginally significant for one- and two-argument verbs. Children with SLI also spent significantly less time looking at the theme zones than their age-matched controls. We suggest that both processing limitations and deficits in the semantic representation of verbs may play a role in these difficulties. (Contains 4 tables, 11 figures and 1 note.)

Background: This study investigated verb argument structure effects in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Aims: A picture-naming paradigm was used to compare the response times and naming accuracy for nouns and verbs with differing argument structure between Spanish-speaking children with and without language impairment. Methods & Procedures: Twenty-four children with SLI (ages 5;3-8;2 [years;months]), 24 age-matched controls (ages 5;3-8;2), 24 MLU-w controls (ages 3;3-7;1 years), and 31 adults participated in a picture-naming study. Outcomes & Results: The results show all groups produced more correct responses and were faster for nouns than all verbs together. As regards verb type accuracy, there were no differences between groups in naming one-argument verbs. However, for both two- and three-argument verbs, children with SLI were less accurate than adults and age-matched controls, but similar to the MLU-matched controls. For verb type latency, children with SLI were slower than both the age-matched controls and adults for one- and two-argument verbs, while no differences were found in three-argument verbs. No differences were found between children with SLI and MLU-matched controls for any verb type. Conclusions & Implications: It has been shown that the naming of verbs is delayed in Spanish children with SLI. It is suggested that children with SLI may have problems encoding semantic representations. (Contains 7 tables, 3 figures, and 1 note.)

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in examining the brain responses to word order variations. In one ERP study conducted in Spanish, Casado, Martin-Loeches, Munoz, and Fernandez-Frias (2005) had participants read Spanish transitive sentences with either an SVO (subject-verb-object) or an OVS order. The word order of a sentence was determined by semantic information (semantic condition) or by syntactic information (syntactic condition). We will focus on the syntactic condition, which suffers from a number of serious pitfalls. By using both linguistic evidence and data from off-line rating studies, we will first show that the authors are wrong in claiming that the OVS sentences in the syntactic condition are grammatical. Secondly, we will show that these sentences are not interpreted as OVS sentences but as SVO sentences. In light of these pitfalls, we conclude that their results in the syntactic condition do not inform issues concerning brain responses to word order variations, but of the detection and repair of an ungrammatical string. (Contains 1 footnote.)

In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that differences in native versus non-native language processing strongly correlate with language distance: native/non-native processing differences obtain if a syntactic parameter of the non-native grammar diverges from the native grammar. Otherwise, non-native processing will approximate native processing as levels of proficiency increase. We focus on three syntactic parameters: (i) the head parameter, (ii) argument alignment (ergative/accusative), and (iii) verb agreement. The first two diverge in Basque and Spanish, but the third is the same in both languages. Our results reveal that native and non-native processing differs for the diverging syntactic parameters, but not for the convergent one. These findings indicate that language distance has a significant impact in non-native language processing.

We report the naming performance of a Spanish patient (AQF) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). AQF's performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with poorer performance in verb than in noun naming. Furthermore, this dissociation was only present in written naming. Importantly, the patient's dissociation between nouns and verbs was present also when we studied her performance with homonymous words. We argue that this dissociation is not due to a range of semantic factors but is a true grammatical category-specific deficit located at the lexical level of orthographic processing. Thus, we bring in new evidence in favour of grammatical category representation at a post-semantic level where output modalities are represented separately. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)

The paper reports data from an on-line peer tutoring project. In the project 78, 9-12-year-old students from Scotland and Catalonia peer tutored each other in English and Spanish via a managed on-line environment. Significant gains in first language (Catalonian pupils) modern language (Scottish pupils) and attitudes towards modern languages (both Catalonian and Scottish pupils) were reported for the experimental group as compared to the control group. Results indicated that pupils tutored each other in using Piagetian techniques of error correction during the project. Error correction provided by tutors to tutees focussed on morph syntaxys, more specifically the correction of verbs. Peer support provided via the on-line environment was predominantly based on the tutor giving the right answer to the tutee. High rates of impact on tutee corrected messages were observed. The implications for peer tutoring initiative taking place via on-line environments are discussed. Implications for policy and practice are explored. (Contains 7 tables.)

In some contact situations between Spanish and English there is an acceleration of the process of the extension of "estar" that may be due to lack of access to the formal written standard, features of English in particular or general processes of simplification that result from the cognitive demands of bilingualism (Silva-Corvalan, 1994). In our large-scale analysis of data from a contextualized preference task collected in four areas of the lberian Peninsula where Spanish is in contact with a regional language (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Valencian) and in monolingual regions of Spain, we identify differences in the numbers of unanimous responses, and frequency and predictors of "estar" selection across populations. We show that more frequent selection of "estar" is not a characteristic of all bilingual groups, and several linguistic predictors of "estar" are common to all groups. Additionally, we find that more frequent selection of "estar" occurs in some varieties even among bilinguals with ample access to the formal standard.

The development of language indicating the emergence of thinking about the thoughts of self and others has been scarcely studied in Spanish-speaking children. For this reason, we studied the development of mental state language and various indicators of language development in 25 Spanish-speaking children assessed at 3, 3 1/2, 4, 4 1/2, and 5 years of age. We coded and categorized the 40,250 utterances children produced during the five time points, 1202 (3.01%) of which had mental terms. In this sample, mental state language in Spanish children developed with a similar timeline and patterns as described in English-speaking children. However, several findings were novel for studies of mental state language. The general indexes of syntactic development did not correlate with the production of mental terms. The Index of Lexical Diversity was associated with the frequency of references to verbs of desire. The results of regression analyses suggest that not only the development of subordinate sentences with complement is associated with genuine mental references to desires and beliefs, but the development of lexical skills as well.

In this article we examine language processing and development in Catalan or Spanish-speaking children with SLI, focusing on the study of the verb. We analyse the key initial phase of its process of acquisition and aim to define common features of the SLI group that distinguish them from children with normal language development. We intend to identify more precisely the kind of delay shown by these children in a language with a rich verb morphology, in terms of both structure and chronology. The sample comprised 18 Catalan-Spanish bilingual pre-school children, assigned to three groups of six; an SLI group and two control groups, one matched for age and the other matched for MLU-w. Developmental data were obtained by recording situations of spontaneous speech at two different time points. Certain differences were found between groups in verb production. Production of verb inflection by children with SLI was only partial at the first evaluation; they maintained the same percentage of errors after a year. The patterns of correct and incorrect verb forms found in Catalan and Spanish do not corroborate the EOI hypothesis, but they support the Surface Hypothesis, given that the number of errors is not particularly high. This suggests the presence of limitations in subjects' processing ability, linked to the typological characteristics of the specific language being learnt. (Contains 13 tables and 7 notes.)

In recent years, many European countries have witnessed a rapid implementation of the CLIL approach at tertiary level. In Spain, although English has been introduced as the language of instruction in some master and doctoral courses, the application of the CLIL approach is still isolated. Similarly, little research has been done into CLIL discursive features and teacher-student positioning in the Spanish university context. Focusing on university lectures by non-native speakers, the present paper explores the use of two relevant areas of stance: (i) pronominal forms, and their discursive functions; and (ii) modal verbs occurring within verbal clusters that accompany pronouns. The study is based on a quantitative analysis of these two linguistic devices in terms of number of occurrences and frequency. The results show that inclusive we is by far the most frequent pronominal form, functioning as a solidarity mechanism and helping to establish common ground. Furthermore, the functions assigned to the two most recurrent modal verbs, can and have to, are found to minimise also the speaker's authority while inserted within a problem-solving framework and guiding the steps of scientific reasoning.

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the processing of the empty category PRO and the time-course of this in Spanish. Eye movements were recorded while participants read sentences in which a matrix clause was followed by a subordinate infinitival clause, so that the subject or the object of the main clause could act as controller of PRO, and therefore as implicit grammatical subject of the infinitive. In Experiment 1, verb control information was manipulated: The matrix clause contained either subject-control verbs like "prometer" ("promise") or object-control verbs like "forzar" ("force"). In Experiment 2, the preposition that headed adverbial subordinate clauses was manipulated: Two different kinds of infinitival adverbial clauses were used, expressing purpose (preposition para) and reason (preposition por) and in which control information is primarily "induced" by the prepositions ("para" tends to trigger subject-control; "por" object-control). Experiment 1 showed that readers make immediate use of verb control information to recover the antecedent of the empty category PRO in Spanish obligatory control constructions. The data obtained in Experiment 2 suggest that during the processing of the empty category PRO in purpose vs. reason adverbial subordinate infinitival clauses the control information "induced" by the prepositions "por" vs. "para" is not initially used as a constraint to guide the selection of the nominal antecedent of PRO. In addition, both experiments showed that PRO antecedent selection is a very fast process and that, together with verb control information, recency played an important role. The results are discussed in terms of current psycholinguistic hypotheses about empty categories and in relation to formal linguistic hypotheses about PRO control. We argue that obligatory control ties (which are co-referential ties) are processed fast because they are launched from the same lexical platform that launches all fast syntactic connections (complements, as opposed to modifiers). In short, that such lexically-specified co-referential ties are regulated by linguistic form.

The advantages and disadvantages of wider or narrower definitions of "pidginization" and "pidgin" are reviewed to determine the differences between pidgins and naturalistically learned second languages (L2s). It is argued that a wider definition is preferred because it avoids problematic counterexamples and captures generalizations that allow us to view the difference between naturalistic L2 varieties and pidgins as one of degree, not of type. In first language (L1) acquisition, Bates and Goodman (1999) showed the link between the development of vocabulary and grammar and argued that this may be explained by, among other things, logical and perceptual bootstrapping. It is suggested that these types of bootstrapping are also relevant for explaining the pace of grammar development in pidgins and naturalistic L2 varieties. The tense-aspect system of a Spanish variety spoken by a Chinese immigrant in Spain is examined in detail. The data, taken from a 90-minute interview that yielded 602 tokens, reveal several clear traits of the informant's verbal system: (a) All nonfinite, imperfective verb forms (gerunds) correspond exclusively to Vendlerian activities; (b) all but three of the perfective nonfinite forms (past participles) correspond to telic verbs or predicates; and (c) 81% of the stative verbs appear in the third-person-singular present form. The sensitivity to aspectual distinctions in the informant's variety of Spanish is not addressed by logical and perceptual bootstrapping. Furthermore, although this sensitivity can be partially explained by language-specific considerations (i.e., transfer from Mandarin), such an explanation does not speak to precise form-function mappings found, which are best accounted for by appealing to the Primacy of Aspect and Distributional Bias hypotheses (Andersen, 1993; Andersen & Shirai, 1996).

The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of word order in unergative and unaccusative constructions in Basque (e.g., negar ein 'to cry' and heldu 'to arrive', respectively). It considers the results of an acceptability judgment as well as elicitation tasks carried out among two generations of Basque native speakers (55–75 years old, and 35–45 years old). Unlike the younger participants, the older participants lack the syntactic focus strategy. It is proposed that this lack among the older participants was conditioned by the socially restricted bilingualism that they experienced during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), while the younger participants appeared to have acquired (i.e. recovered) the syntactic focus strategy because they experienced the legitimacy and vitality of Basque in public life and in formal education following the Normalization Law of 1982. Studies in Basque sociolinguistics have identified language changes through feature loss, dialectal leveling and contact-induced change, but no studies to date have identified the recovery of a previously lost syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The goal of the following text is to analyze the changes in television advertising in the banking and automobile sectors, according to the social context. The hypothesis is that communication is significantly influenced by the situational context, causing differences between the advertising of the two sectors. A multimodal discourse analysis is used, comparing twenty commercials from the banking and automobile sectors in 2019 and 2020, the period during which the lockdown due to COVID-19 took place. Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis tables were developed with which to analyze general data such as the value proposition or target audience of the advert, or other special data like the text (verb tenses, rhetorical figures...), the image and the sound used. The fact that context is decisive in communication is made evident, and since this is different in every sector, the communication strategy is clearly different as well. However, the points that the two sectors have in common are remarkable: these range from talking about brands and products, to speaking for and about people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence. In the early centuries of the history of Spanish only a few verbs were integrated in the new scheme, which could receive an experience, modal or quantitative meaning, depending on an analogical association with certain frequent verbs. As the construction gained productivity, the importance of these few specific verbs as models for the newly integrated ones was reduced and the construction as a whole was understood in a more general sense of uncontrolled state or event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Majorcan dialectologist Antoni M. Alcover (1862-1932) was the first researcher to record information for use in the study of the conjugation of Catalan verbs. He compiled almost 500,000 verb forms corresponding to the complete conjugation of 75 verbs in 149 localities in the Catalan-speaking area. These data were published under the title 'La flexió verbal en els dialectes catalans'. From 1999, work began to complete and computerize these materials in order to make them accessible to scholars in the field and to the public. These computer applications have a descriptive character: they show dialectal and subdialectal areas, and isoglosses, in a graphic form. However, it is also possible to use these materials from an interpretative point of view. The aim of this paper is to apply a suitable dialectometric analysis to the 'Verbal flexion' materials, which can only be interpreted using quantitative analysis techniques. Taking multiple answers into account, we use the calculation of the Mean Degree of Confluence and we compare the results with the dialectometric analysis obtained applying Hans Goebl's methodology, which is based on the use of single answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into the use of the Present Perfect in various Romance languages often finds that the Present Perfect is taking over functions previously accomplished through the Preterite. This is also the case in Peninsular Spanish. A key constraint on the alternation of the Present Perfect and the Preterite involves the time-frame distinction of "today" versus "before-today". Among the various dialects of Spanish spoken in Spain,the regional dialect of Bilbao has been identified as having the highest percentage of "today" Present Perfects. Nonetheless, no community-based study of this dialect has been carried out. This study reports the results of a variationist study of the increasing use of the Present Perfect instead of Preterite in the city of Bilbao, Spain, based on 49 sociolinguistic interviews. Twenty factor groups involving linguistic constraints were analyzed. The findings support the findings of previous research except for the case of telicity, polarity and clause type that were not found to be significant in previous research. In addition, the findings provide new evidence of the significance of the following factors in a multi-variate analysis of the alternation of the Present Perfect and the Preterite: mood, the following verb's mood, the following verb's tense and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the loss of intervocalic -d- consonant in the stressed endings of the Old Spanish second-person plural verb which occurs in three tenses including present indicative, present subjunctive, and future indicative. It says that a collection of the 14th and the 15th century Andalusian texts were examined in the study. It adds that the loss of -d- has begun in the future tense which simultaneously affect the first and second conjugation verbs.

Abstract: The present study examined politeness phenomenon in Spanish discourse produced between a therapist and a client during psychotherapeutic motivational interviews as depression and adherence to medication are discussed. In particular, this study examined the mitigation strategies and indirect speech acts used by the interactants. Mitigation has been defined as a modification of a speech act that softens the message for its hearer (:341). Several devices such as shields, hedges, parenthetical verbs and proverbial sayings were observed in this discursive context in the qualitative and quantitative analyses. This study also revealed that the use of mitigating devices on the part of the therapist was conditioned by his intentions to attain his goals: to indirectly motivate the client to continue with treatment. The qualitative analysis revealed how references to persons varied and how the Latino cultural notions of el qúe dirán and guardar las apariencias posited by emerged in this discursive context. Although mitigating features have been investigated in Spanish (, among others), overall they remain relatively under investigated in Spanish psychotherapeutic discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although mood distinction in Spanish has received much attention (Bell 1980, Lunn 1989. Silva-Corvalán 1994a), few sociolinguistic studies have considered the observation that the subjunctive- indicative contrast is a multi-layered system (Haverkate 2002) within a single statistical analysis in order to better understand how native speakers vary their use of verbal moods. The current study addresses this issue by refining variables examined previously and identifying new factors that condition mood use and by investigating these features systematically in one multivariate regression model. The results show those that predict mood are semantic category, form regularity, time reference, hypotheticality, and task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]