This article analyses the prosodic adaptation of Anglicisms in a spontaneous speech context by native European Spanish and Mexican speakers. The change of code between languages may carry prosodic ...markers (Navracsics, 2014), which can be a disfluency phenomenon, such as a short pause or syllable lengthening for hesitation — these being the two most common hesitation patterns (Deme & Markó, 2013). The research has been conducted on filled pauses and lengthening of the Spanish and Mexican language varieties, based on audio corpus of native Spanish and Mexican speakers, following Cantero’s method of Prosodic Analysis of Speech (2019) with modest changes. In this preliminary study, we have found that hesitation can be observed in the context of Anglicisms in the majority of both Mexican and Spanish speech productions, but a difference was discovered in its placement within the sentence. Furthermore, according to the sample, the relative syllable lengths of European Spanish speakers on a lengthened syllable differ more from the previous or the average syllable length of the speaker than in the case of slower Mexican speakers, where it is not always an obviously detectable phenomenon. Therefore, the decrease of speech rate around Anglicisms in the case of European Spanish speakers is more noticeable. Although longer syllables were also observed on Anglicisms themselves, the extent of this prolongation differed from the degree of syllables containing the hesitation phenomenon, and was probably caused only by the slower articulation of consonant clusters characteristic of Anglicisms.
In Latin American and Caribbean States the verbal violence against women on social networks, such as Twitter, is a serious threat that has been addressed through the implementation of social norms, ...public policies, and social movements. Nevertheless, a challenge is the effective and automatic real-time detection of violent tweets. In this sense, traditional machine learning algorithms have been proposed to tackle social issues where the training process is performed in a static manner. However, considering that Twitter is a dynamic environment where a vast of tweets are generated each second, it requires powerful machine learning algorithms that could exploit this pool of unlabeled data to be incorporated into the model through continuous updates. This paper explores an active learning method based on uncertainty sampling, which identifies the most confusing tweets to be labeled by an expert in real-time. This focused selection prioritizes which data can be used to train a multilayer perceptron that can achieve a better performance with fewer training samples. Experimental results show that including new samples yields promising results, increasing the AUC from 0.8712 to 0.8833.
Aims and objectives: The current paper utilizes corpus data to examine variation and potential language contact effects regarding pronominal subject placement among first-generation immigrants in ...Atlanta, with particular attention paid to the individual speaker. The research questions that guide the study are the following: What linguistic and social predictors govern subject placement in Mexican Spanish spoken in Roswell, GA? What role, if any, does English contact play in the overall preverbal rates and/or constraints that govern subject placement? Do the data show any substantial individual differences with regard to rates of subject placement? If so, how might the inclusion versus exclusion of these speakers influence the overall interpretation of the results? Design and data: This study employs a variationist sociolinguistic framework, and the speakers comprise 20 first-generation Mexican immigrants living in Georgia. Analysis: Descriptive statistics are employed for purposes of overall as well as individual usage rates of postverbal subjects. In addition, linguistic (e.g., person/number, priming) and social predictors (e.g., sex, English proficiency, preferred media language) were incorporated into logistic regression analyses using Rbrul. Findings: Pronominal subject placement is most strongly influenced by person/number. Third-person singular pronouns favor postverbals while other pronouns favor preverbal position. Regarding social predictors, both sex and preferred media language appeared to play significant roles in the initial analysis; however, upon considering outlier speaker effects, the apparent effect of sex disappeared. The media language effect shows that those with a preference for English media favor preverbal subjects, suggesting a potential language contact effect. Originality and implications: The current study is the first to analyze this phenomenon in southeastern U.S. Spanish. The findings have implications for the study of language contact and change, demonstrating the importance of considering how individual speakers could misrepresent the overall data, interpretations of results, and conclusions in sociolinguistic studies of bilingualism.
El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar la variación social y estilística en la prosodia enunciativa del español de Mérida, Yucatán. Se analizan enun-ciados aseverativos provenientes de entrevistas ...sociolingüísticas y de una encuesta de situaciones, considerando las variables sociales de edad, género y escolaridad. El análisis prosódico se lleva a cabo bajo los postulados del modelo métrico-autosegmental (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008) y el sistema de notación Sp_ToBI (Hualde y Prieto 2015). Los resultados muestran que esta variedad de español se caracteriza por un prominente descenso a partir del primer pico tonal, el alineamiento temprano de algunos de los picos tonales en posición prenuclear y la presencia de algunas junturas no descendentes. La variación social y estilística sugiere que los dos últimos son rasgos que indizan vernacularidad.
La presente investigación describe las variaciones que presenta la frecuencia fundamental (F0) de un acto de habla asertivo cuando expresa emociones (de forma adyacente) como alegría, tristeza y ...enojo, al igual que la influencia de la edad, el sexo y el nivel de instrucción. Para ello se llevó a cabo una prueba semi-controlada a un total de 18 colaboradores quienes produjeron el mismo enunciado con las tres emociones por estudiar más un enunciado “no marcado”. Los datos se analizaron empleando Praat en su versión 6.1.50 y el sistema de etiquetado Sp_ToBI. Los resultados muestran una variación estadísticamente significativa de la F0 cuando se expresa alegría y enojo, así como la influencia de las variables sexo y nivel de instrucción.
This paper presents a comparative study of the lexical anglicisms found in 36 interviews from two Preseea Mexico communities: Puebla and Mexicali. From a dialectal point of view, Puebla is a variety ...of the Mexican Altiplano, while Mexicali corresponds to the northwest Baja Californian dialect. Our analysis focuses on the grammatical and referential characteristics of these anglicisms and on contrasting their presence and frequency of appearance in these interviews. Therefore, we look for quantitative and qualitative indications to determine if one area uses more lexical anglicisms than the other. In principle, Mexicali, due to its proximity to the US border and the contact between Spanish and English, could be a dialect with a greater use of lexical anglicisms, however, the results partially confirm this hypothesis. Likewise, our findings show the importance of the borrowing of proper names from English into Mexican Spanish.
Este trabajo presenta un estudio comparado de los anglicismos léxicos encontrados en 36 entrevistas de dos comunidades de PRESEEA México: Puebla y Mexicali. Desde una perspectiva dialectal, Puebla es una variedad del Altiplano mexicano, mientras que Mexicali corresponde a la frontera noroeste bajacaliforniana. Nuestro análisis se enfoca en las características gramaticales y referenciales de estos anglicismos y en contrastar su presencia y frecuencia de aparición en estas entrevistas. Damos cuenta de aquellos anglicismos compartidos y diferentes en ambos corpus y buscamos indicios cuantitativos y cualitativos para determinar si una zona es más anglicista que la otra. Partimos de la idea de que Mexicali podría ser más anglicista por encontrarse cerca de la frontera con EUA, lo que, en principio, representaría una zona de mayor contacto entre el español y el inglés. Los resultados comprueban parcialmente nuestras hipótesis y destacan la importancia de los préstamos en nombres propios.
Abstract The present investigation is a conversation-analytic study that examines a particular type of informing sequence where the new information is received with a turn displaying ritualized ...disbelief. In this paper, I analyze a range of ritualized disbelief and news-confirmation turn designs in Mexican Spanish talk: I describe the trajectory that different ritualized disbeliefs have, the composition of the disbelief they display, and how news-producers deal with ritualized disbelief turns. I argue that a speaker’s knowledge about the matter at hand relates to the type of disbelief expressed in his or her disbelieving turn; that is, the social actions involved in this type of sequences show a relationship between turn design, epistemics and disbelief.
This study of syllable‐final /s/ reduction in a 55‐speaker corpus of Spanish in Juchitán, México, a contact variety, uses both language contact and social processes to explain its results. Contact ...with the indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language leads to decreased rates of syllable‐final /s/ retention, creating a locally salient n+1‐order index between “Zapotecness” and /s/ reduction that influences the indexical field for syllable‐final /s/ reduction. Zapotec identity is associated with tradition and femininity. Therefore, in this new indexical field, syllable‐final /s/ reduction comes to directly index Zapotec language dominance and indirectly index both femininity and tradition. This leads feminine and elderly speakers to reduce /s/ more frequently than “less feminine” and young speakers, even though the opposite pattern is usually found in other varieties. The results show, therefore, that language contact can influence the indexical field typically linked to socially meaningful variation and thereby cause unexpected patterns of variation to emerge.
Resumen en español
Este estudio explica la elisión de la /s/ implosiva, en un corpus de 55 hablantes de español de Juchitán, México, en términos del contacto lingüístico y de procesos sociales. Por un lado, el contacto entre la lengua indígena, el zapoteco del Istmo, y el español disminuye la tasa de retención de la /s/, lo cual produce un índice del orden n+1 de indexicalidad entre la “zapotequidad” y la elisión de la /s/ que influye en el campo indexical de la retención de la /s/ implosiva. Ya que la identidad zapoteca se asocia con lo tradicional y lo femenino, en el campo indexical, la elisión de la /s/ implosiva pasa a ser un índice directo de la lengua zapoteca y un índice indirecto de la feminidad y la tradición. Por lo tanto, las hablantes femeninas y de edad avanzada eliden la /s/ con más frecuencia que los hablantes “menos femeninos” y jóvenes, aunque, en otros contextos hispanohablantes, suele darse el patrón contrario. Los resultados muestran, por ende, que el contacto lingüístico puede influir en el campo indexical de una variante socialmente significativa y así llevar a nuevos patrones inesperados de variación.
Mexican Spanish is generally recognized as a conservative variety that maintains syllablefinal /s/, while Puerto Rican Spanish consistently weakens it. To explore what social properties are indexed ...by coda /s/ variants and whether these variants alone can alter evaluations of speaker origin, 75 Mexican listeners participated in a matched-guise test. They listened to recordings of five Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish speakers spliced to include only coda s or coda h, evaluating speakers on a scale of social properties and identifying their perceived place of origin. Mixed effects models fitted to 6,750 evaluations demonstrate that s is associated with various measures of status, including intelligence, work ethic, confidence, and snobbishness. However, these evaluations are conditioned by listeners' stereotypes and regional expectations, as Mexicans were evaluated as speaking better Spanish when presented with s and Puerto Ricans as speaking better Spanish with h. Finally, listeners evaluated Puerto Rican voices as significantly more Mexican given coda s and Mexican voices as significantly more Caribbean given coda h, with the most drastic shift for Mexican speakers. The paper concludes that manipulating a single salient variable (/s/) is sufficient to override other linguistic features, which play a much more limited role in social identification and evaluation.
This article discusses the diachronic development and the different uses of the reportative word
(diachronically based on
‘she/he/it says that’) using data from Colombian and Mexican Spanish. The ...study presents a predominantly qualitative analysis of diachronic, twentieth- and twenty-first-century written data. The theoretical framework applied in this article is Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), which is particularly useful in this context as it distinguishes between the interpersonal and representational functions of language. The main points made are: (i)
is an adverb that arose from a process of lexicalization rather than grammaticalization; (ii) in most of its uses,
has an interpersonal function in the sense that the Speaker instructs the Addressee that she/he is not the source of the information provided; (iii) by means of diachronic, dialectal, and typological data, it is shown that the scope of
is gradually decreasing; (iv) the only scope decrease that leads to a functional change of
is its application outside the context of speech-reports. FDG serves to account for each step in the scope decrease of
by means of its hierarchical approach to the actional and descriptive functions of verbal interaction.
