Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics

Review of 'The fundamentally simple logic of language', by Luis H. González

Antonio Fábregas — 2024-11-29

Review of the following book:

González, L. H. (2020). The fundamentally simple logic of language. Oxford: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003139225

Auxiliary selection across Catalan dialects: an overview

Anna Pineda — 2024-11-29

This article presents a comprehensive description of auxiliary selection in Catalan. Specifically, after explaining how the phenomenon worked in Old Catalan, we show what are the factors (such as the event/argument structure or the grammatical person, among others) that determine the use of be and have in those Catalan varieties that, although with some innovations, retain this distinction: (i) Algherese Catalan, (ii) Northern Catalan and some varieties of Central Catalan, (iii) Ribagorçan Catalan, and (iv) Balearic Catalan. Likewise, we show a series of theoretical considerations that we believe relevant for the analysis of the patterns of variation found in Catalan and, by extension, in Romance.

Theories of argument structure

Antonio Fábregas — 2024-11-29

This work discusses the different theories that have attempted to explain the relation between the lexical information provided by a predicate and the syntactic structures that introduce arguments. The focus of the article is in the different sets of assumptions and predictions made by endo-skeletal theories, where lexical items somehow condition the syntactic projection of arguments, and exo-skeletal theories, where lexical items must adapt their meaning to whichever argument structure syntax has defined. In doing so, the article reviews the Theta Criterion, the thematic hierarchy, the notion of linking, the syntactic and semantic decomposition of lexical verbs and the different types of theta role definitions from a formal semantic perspective.

La cortesía retrogratificadora en las felicitaciones de logros de los personajes influyentes españoles en Instagram

Laura María Porrino Moscoso — 2024-11-29

Actualmente, Instagram es la red preferida por los usuarios, los creadores de contenido y las empresas (Kemp 2024: 277-280). Entre los contenidos que más publican los internautas destacan las felicitaciones, que son actos expresivos de cortesía positiva que ensalzan la imagen del destinatario. A pesar de ello, todavía no hay investigaciones cortesiológicas que aborden su estudio. El objetivo del presente trabajo ha sido examinar la cortesía retrogratificadora que los personajes influyentes españoles de Instagram emplean al felicitar logros profesionales a personas cercanas, y las estrategias corteses que sus amigos y familiares utilizan cuando comentan. Esta cortesía valorizante produce un beneficio mutuo en las imágenes del autor y de sus destinatarios.

Basándonos en los principales modelos de cortesía que tratan la imagen (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1992, 1996) y en la taxonomía de respuestas a felicitaciones propuesta por Elwood (2004), realizamos un análisis sociopragmático de un corpus de felicitaciones realizadas durante la pandemia y la pospandemia de la COVID-19 por conocidos creadores de Instagram. Los resultados mostraron que, además de las felicitaciones, estos incluían en sus contenidos y en sus comentarios, sobre todo, muestras de afecto, elogios y afirmaciones. Los comentadores, en lugar de felicitar, preferían mostrar afecto, elogiar y aplaudir la buena noticia. A su vez, autores y comentadores reforzaban sus intervenciones con diversos mecanismos de intensificación de cortesía retrogratificadora. Igualmente, se observó que los emojis son una pieza imprescindible para expresar cortesía retrogratificadora en las felicitaciones de logros.

Los verbos más disponibles en español y su activación de estructuras argumentales

Alvaro Recio — 2024-11-29

Este artículo analiza las características morfosintácticas de los verbos más disponibles en español, la configuración de su red léxica y las estructuras argumentales que se activan ante sus diferentes clases y subclases. Para ello, se emplea la metodología de la disponibilidad gramatical como desarrollo reciente de la disponibilidad léxica: pruebas de evocación de palabras y pruebas de producción de oraciones. Los resultados muestran que los verbos más disponibles tienden a ser predicativos, bivalentes, transitivos, no pronominales y de acción, perfil que se corresponde con las subclases más representativas en la teoría lingüística, las cuales favorecen el procesamiento por su asociación directa con acciones específicas. La red léxica generada sugiere que los verbos conforman una categoría de base natural debido a la importancia de la organización semántica subyacente, aunque también se revelen asociaciones de naturaleza gramatical. Por último, la disponibilidad de estructuras argumentales depende en buena medida de la tipología verbal y de la relevancia cognitiva de las unidades léxicas. Los verbos intransitivos suelen generar más adjuntos, mientras que los transitivos tienden a activar más argumentos explícitos. Entre los intransitivos, son los inacusativos los que inducen más argumentos, mientras que entre los transitivos destacan los verbos de percepción por su capacidad para activar explícitamente más argumentos internos, en contraste con los de consumo y creación. Este trabajo pone nuevamente de manifiesto la compleja interacción entre léxico, sintaxis y semántica en la construcción del conocimiento lingüístico y sugiere nuevas direcciones para la investigación en procesamiento del lenguaje y categorización verbal.

All passive participles are adjectival

Alfredo García-Pardo — 2024-11-29

This paper argues that the passive participles in eventive passives (what is commonly referred to as 'verbal passives') are adjectival in Spanish. Thus, there is no categorial difference between eventive and stative passives (the latter commonly known as `adjectival passives'. I show that the differences between eventive and stative passive participles, and the argument structure configurations that each type allows, can be accounted for without the need to posit a different morphological category for each type. Rather, the grammatical context in which the participle is inserted will allow for a simpler (stative) or more complex (eventive) structure for the base verb. I thus also argue against a stativization operation in stative passives: what we have is a base verb that only spells out the result state of the event, not a verb that spells out a telic structure and then is stativized by a purported higher operator.

Insights into Spanish metrical structure through language games

Felix Fonseca Quesada — 2024-11-29

Some Spanish language games involve reordering the syllables of the words. However, the stressed syllable of the game word does not always match the stressed syllable in the original Spanish word and/or the position of the stress in the original Spanish word. Using game words found in different sources, a corpus of 261 words from different Spanish games was created to account for the games’ stress patterns. The metrical structure of the language games (e.g., Vesre, which is a game in Argentina and Uruguay) was analyzed. The results of the analysis suggest that the game words’ metrical structures are composed of quantity-sensitive, right-aligned trochee, in which the stress falls in penultimate position in vowel-final words, and consonant-final words generally have final stress, confirming previous proposals about the default metrical structure of Spanish (Harris, 1983; Núñez-Cedeño and Morales-Front, 1999). Overall, these Spanish language games illustrate The Emergence of The Unmarked (TETU) in metrical structure, providing evidence of Spanish stress assignment, whereby the unmarked stress pattern is a right-aligned quantity-sensitive trochee.

Determined Proper Nouns in Rioplatense Spanish express interpersonal proximity

Carolina Oggiani — 2024-11-29

Following the referentialist view on proper nouns, based on Kripke (1980), they are expressions of type <e>, pointing out to entities directly, without providing a description of those entities (cf. Kaplan 1989, Soames 2002, Jeshion 2015, Saab & Lo Guercio 2018). Proper nouns preceded by the definite article in Rioplatense Spanish challenge this approach because the definite article, of type <<e,t> <e>>, is neither combining with an NP of type <e, t>, nor contributing with its propositional meaning, namely, definiteness. In this squib, we tackle this challenge by proposing that the article preceding a proper noun in Rioplatense Spanish is an expletive of type <e,e> (Longobardi 1994; Saab 2021; Tsiakmakis & Espinal 2022), which brings along the expressive meaning of interpersonal proximity by activating the interactional structure above the DP (a là Wiltschko 2021).

Stereotypes in linguistic innovation

Juan Escalona Torres — 2024-11-29

The discourse marker “en plan,” akin to English “like,” has gained attention due to its rapid spread across Spain. Using explicit and implicit attitude surveys, we examine perceptions of quotative marker “en plan” by Spaniards. Our findings show that “en plan” is mainly associated with younger age groups and casual speech, leading to mixed social attitudes. While some view it as a marker of youth speech and sociability, others see it as indicative of a lack of social refinement or education. The study highlights generational divides, with older speakers often stigmatizing its use, while younger speakers show neutral and positive attitudes. These attitudes reflect broader societal views on language, age, and identity. By focusing on the social perceptions and stereotypes associated with “en plan,” this research underscores the complex relationship between language and social identity, offering insights into how linguistic forms represent particular social groups and influence interactions within the speech community.

Los modos y las modalidades del español como mezclas cromáticas

Carina Lia — 2024-11-29

This paper divides modal matrices into five classes as chromatic compounds of two basic colors, red and blue, which, in principle, are in direct correspondence with the basic speech acts in independent sentences: information (declarative and interrogative sentences) and interaction (imperative sentences). Between those two poles we distinguish three chromatic blends, opposed to those with just one single color. In this intermediate space, doubt is represented as more blue than red, and desire as more red than blue, while the same amount of red and blue, violet, characterizes the world of values, and assessment. This classification allows us to identify not only those five basic modal matrices but also new classes encompassing two or more basic ones, according to their respective chromatic proportions: one with blue as dominant, another one with red, and yet two more categories in which neither red, nor blue are dominant. All those categories so defined, either basic or compound, have grammatical and syntactic consequences. Summing up, the chromatic classification, without direct correspondence with interpretable semantic features, is incomparably more flexible than any other previous model when it comes to not only describing the syntactic properties of each class but also showing the mutual relationship between them.