scholarly journals The historical present in Spanish and semantic/pragmatic structure

Pragmatics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-31
Author(s):  
Carlos Benavides
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Specific Interaction ◽  
Parallel Architecture ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Formal Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Architecture Framework ◽  
Conversational Narrative ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Structure Language

Abstract The historical present (HP) is the use of the present tense to refer to past events, usually as part of a narrative. Most work on this topic has dealt with the functions of English HP, mainly within the context of tense switching in conversational narrative. Relatively little work focuses exclusively on HP in Spanish, and most of it deals with the function of HP in conversational narratives. There is a gap in the literature regarding the specific interaction between the semantics and pragmatics involved in the use of HP, especially with respect to the formal representation of this interaction. In order to fill this gap, this paper analyzes the use of HP within the Parallel Architecture framework (Jackendoff 2002) and examines the implications for the semantic/pragmatic structure. Language samples produced by native speakers of Spanish and data from a large Spanish corpus are used as part of the basis for analysis. The present study also explores how the use of the preterite and imperfect in narrative in the past parallels the use of the simple present and the present progressive in narrative within the present timeframe, and shows how this can also be fruitfully analyzed employing the Parallel Architecture. The result is an original model that extends the formal apparatus of the Parallel Architecture to an area where it has not been applied before, the interface between semantics and narrative structure.

scholarly journals El pretérito pluscuamperfecto como marca de género narrativo en el español andino del Noroeste de la Argentina

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-167
Author(s):  
Lidia Chang ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Andean Spanish ◽  
Mutual Relation ◽  
Northwest Argentina ◽  
The Past ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Verb Forms

In her research about the past tense forms from the Quechua Southern Conchucos lands (Ancash, Peru), Hintz (2007) finds equivalences between some functions of the narrative structure of both the past tense in Quechua and the past tense in Spanish among the bilingual speakers of Quechua-Spanish. In this work, we analyze a group of not-experienced native speakers’ oral testimonies of Andean Spanish from Northwest Argentina. We seek to find a mutual relation between evidential and affect functions of the Quechua suffix -na: and the use of the pluperfect of Andean Spanish. Our findings show that there is a partial grammar barrowing between the two forms. We envisage also that the pluperfect appears remarkably more often in certain parts of the narrative structure, usually along with one of the decir verb forms as a metadiscursive markers (Chang, 2018 and 2019).

Salvaging the Mother Tongue in Exile

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Tomás Espino Barrera
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
First Language ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
First Language Attrition ◽  
Lost In Translation ◽  
Deliberate Effort ◽  
Deep Sense

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.

The expectation marker of course in a cross-linguistic perspective

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen ◽  
Karin Aijmer
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Pragmatic Markers ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Multilingual Corpus ◽  
Core Meaning

The study of of course presented in this article has an applied, a descriptive and a theoretical aim. Since of course proves to be very frequent in English, learners will need to know what meanings the item has and in what pragmatic contexts it is used. It has indeed been shown that some learners tend to use of course in contexts where it is felt by native speakers to be inappropriate. In order to explain such inappropriate uses we need detailed descriptions of the semantics and pragmatics of of course. From a theoretical point of view such multifunctional items raise the question of whether semantic polysemy or pragmatic polysemy is the best explanatory account. It is argued in this paper that empirical cross-linguistic work can contribute to providing answers to all three research questions. First, the study of correspondences and differences between languages with regard to the meanings and uses of pragmatic markers is a necessary step in the explanation of learner problems. Second, the bidirectional approach to equivalents, which involves going back and forth from sources to translations, enables us to show to what extent the equivalents have partially overlapping pragmatic functions. An in-depth comparison of the semantic fields in which the translation equivalents operate is the ultimate goal. Third, the translation method helps to see to what extent a core meaning account is justified. In this paper three languages are brought into the picture, viz. English, Swedish and Dutch. The cross-linguistic data have been gathered from three translation corpora, i.e. the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus, the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the Namur Triptic Corpus.

Why is this happened? Passive morphology and unaccusativity

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Balcom
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Unaccusative Verbs

Zobl discussed inappropriate passive morphology (‘be’ and the past participle) in the English writing of L2 learners, linking its occurrence to the class of unaccusative verbs and proposing that learners subsume unaccusatives under the syntactic rule for passive formation. The research reported here supports and amplifies Zobl' proposal, based on a grammaticality judgement task and a controlled production task containing verbs from a variety of subclasses of unaccusatives. The tasks were administered to Chinese L1 learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. Results show that subjects both used and judged as grammatical inappropriate passive morphology with all verbs falling under the rubric of unaccusativity. The article concludes with linguistic representations which maintain Zobl’s insights but are consistent with current theories of argument structure.

Introduction: Current perspectives on positive polarity

Linguistics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-300
Author(s):  
Mingya Liu ◽  
Gianina Iordăchioaia
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Different Sources

Abstract Polarity sensitivity has been an established key topic of linguistic research for more than half a century. The study of polarity phenomena can be extremely revealing about the internal structure of a language, as they usually involve an interaction at the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In the past, most attention was paid to negative polarity items. However, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in positive polarity items. As a continuation of this trend, this issue collects four papers dedicated to positive polarity items, which enrich the empirical domain with novel observations from different languages and appeal to diverse theoretical concepts such as scalarity and presupposition in their modeling of positive polarity. The results show that positive polarity is a distributional phenomenon that has different sources and most likely cannot be modeled in a unifying way, although there may be subsets of positive polarity items that allow unifying accounts.

scholarly journals Maria Theresa and the Love of Her Subjects

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Past

I have been asked to speak about the life of the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa. I would like to start by directing your attention to the cover pictures of three recent biographies (Figures 1‒3). If you look at these pictures you will find one astonishing commonality. I am sure that this is neither a coincidence, nor just a fad: on each of the three covers, you only see a part of the portrait. For me, this perfectly symbolizes a specific, skeptical view of biography writing. As a biographer, these cover pictures say, you never get the whole picture of a person. It's always up to the author not only to choose the material but also to establish a certain narrative structure. A life is not a story, and a biography does not simply tell itself. There is always more than one true life story of a person. As the Swiss historian Valentin Groebner recently put it: “The past is a big untidy cellar. It is a bit damp and dark and smells a bit strange there. We go down and get what we want.” What you choose and how you arrange it—which story you tell—depends on which perspective you take and in what you are interested.

scholarly journals Neural Correlates of Temporal Presentness in the Precuneus: A Cross-linguistic fMRI Study based on Speech Stimuli

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Long Tang ◽  
Toshimitsu Takahashi ◽  
Tamami Shimada ◽  
Masayuki Komachi ◽  
Noriko Imanishi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Time Perception ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Temporal Discrimination ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Speech Stimuli ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Verb Tense ◽  
Japanese English

Abstract The position of any event in time could be in the present, past, or future. This temporal discrimination is vitally important in our daily conversations, but it remains elusive how the human brain distinguishes among the past, present, and future. To address this issue, we searched for neural correlates of presentness, pastness, and futurity, each of which is automatically evoked when we hear sentences such as “it is raining now,” “it rained yesterday,” or “it will rain tomorrow.” Here, we show that sentences that evoked “presentness” activated the bilateral precuneus more strongly than those that evoked “pastness” or “futurity.” Interestingly, this contrast was shared across native speakers of Japanese, English, and Chinese languages, which vary considerably in their verb tense systems. The results suggest that the precuneus serves as a key region that provides the origin (that is, the Now) of our time perception irrespective of differences in tense systems across languages.

Narrative Structure of Storytelling in Kelantanese Dialect

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Siti Norashikin Azmi ◽  
Hanita Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Audio Recording ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Interview Session ◽  
Systematic Structure

Human interaction involves a process of sharing experiences, telling stories, and retelling stories in a form of narration. While telling story, the narration is structured in a way to make sense to the audiences.This study examined the narrative structures in Kelantanese dialect used by young female native speakers. The participants were two (2) female Kelantanese students, aged 25 and 27 years old, who have completed their undergraduate studies in local universities. Audio recording and semi-structured interview were two types of instruments used for the data collection. Interview session of 1012 words was analyzed using a combination of the theory of Malay sentence classifications and the theory of narrative structure. The findings of this study reveal that the narration in Kelantanese dialect has a systematic structure which consists of title and elaboration. The title consists of the abstract and orientation, while elaboration includes the four stages of narrative structure which are complication, evaluation, resolution and coda. The findings show that the story is unfolded in a structural manner-which means it has the idea and the elaboration of the idea (the story).

History as trauma and the possibility of the future: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Homer
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Theo Angelopoulos has described Taxidi sta Kythira (Voyage to Cythera) (1984) as an attempt to ‘exorcise the past’ and offer the Greek audience a possibility to face the future without the traumas of the past. This article explores the question of the extent to which we can exorcise the past and asks if a future is possible without acknowledging the traumas of the past. Drawing upon cultural trauma theory, the article analyses the Greek Civil War (1946‐49) as a cultural trauma for the Greek Left, especially concerning the recognition of political prisoners and exiles. Psychoanalytic theory, on the other hand, suggests that a fundamental characteristic of trauma is the un-representability of the event itself, as a traumatic event is only known through its persistent reiterations. Through its multi-layered narrative structure and aesthetic strategies of deferral and displacement Voyage to Cythera stages the trauma of the Greek Civil War for both the returning exiles and the generation that followed. As a representation of presence through absence, the article considers Voyage to Cythera in terms of Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of the parapractic text and Max Silverman’s notion of palimpsestic memory whereby the film does not exorcise the past as such but reveals a past haunting the present. The article concludes with the reflection that a traumatic past has a tendency to return however much we may wish to lay it rest.

New Directions in Spanish and Portuguese Corpus Linguistics

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Davies
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Historical Changes ◽  
Register Variation ◽  
Part Of Speech Tagging ◽  
The Past ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Speech Tagging

Abstract Within the past decade several large, freely-available online corpora of Spanish and Portuguese have become available. With these new corpora, researchers of Spanish and Portuguese can now carry out the same type of corpus-based research that has been done for other languages (such as English) for years. This includes advanced research on morphological and syntactic variation (thanks to full functionality with substring searches, part of speech tagging, and lemmatization), semantics and pragmatics (via collocates, synonyms, customized word lists, and word comparisons), and historical changes and synchronic register variation (via architectures and interfaces that allow easy comparisons of frequency in different sections of the corpus).

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