The purpose of the present study is to compare the compliment responses (CRs) provided by 60 native Mexican Spanish speakers and 60 Irish English native speakers. Using a discourse completion task, ...1080 responses were analyzed based on Herbert’s (1989) and Nelson, El Bakary and Al-Batal’s (1993) taxonomy. Findings suggest the existence of cross-cultural similarities in Irish and Mexican CRs in the frequency of deflecting comments and the mechanisms that are used to redirect the praise force. Second, the two languages differ in important ways. In responding to compliments, Irish recipients are much more likely than Mexican speakers to use a single strategy when formulating CRs. The fndings further show that social factors (social distance, social power, gender, and the topic of the compliment) in both Mexican and Irish society seem to be crucial parameters in the formulation and acceptance or rejection of a compliment.
Currently, a significant portion of published research on online hate speech relies on existing textual corpora. However, when examining a specific context, there is a lack of preexisting datasets ...that include the particularities associated with various conditions (e.g., geographic and cultural). This issue is evident in the case of online anti-immigrant speech in Mexico, where available data to study this emergent and often overlooked phenomenon are scarce. In light of this situation, we propose a novel methodology wherein three domain experts annotate a certain number of texts related to the subject. We establish a precise control mechanism based on these annotations to evaluate non-expert annotators. The evaluation of the contributors is implemented in a custom annotation platform, enabling us to conduct a controlled crowdsourcing campaign and assess the reliability of the obtained data. Our results demonstrate that a combination of crowdsourced and expert data leads to iterative improvements, not only in the accuracy achieved by various machine learning classification models (reaching 0.8828) but also in the model’s adaptation to the specific characteristics of hate speech in the Mexican Twittersphere context. In addition to these methodological innovations, the most significant contribution of our work is the creation of the first online Mexican anti-immigrant training corpus for machine-learning-based detection tasks.
The aims of this article are a) to describe the tonal configurations used in statements of contact Spanish in the area of San Miguel Canoa, Puebla, and b) to show the relationship between pitch ...accents and social variables such as gender, age, educational level, and bilingualism of the informants. The analysis of these semi-spontaneous speech utterances showed that i) it is a variety that promotes the use of pitch accents with (very) early-peak alignment, such as H*, L+H* and L+>H*, both in prenuclear and nuclear positions, ii) the nuclear pitch configurations L+H* L% and L+>H* L%, reinforced by the upstep diacritic at times, characterize the statements of broad, narrow and contradiction focus in this variety of Spanish, and iii) the use of pitch accents whose peak its early it is correlated with adults or older people, who have a low or no educational level, and who are usually bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish. These findings contribute to research on prosodic contact and prosody of Mexican Spanish.
Los objetivos de este artículo son a) describir las configuraciones tonales empleadas en los enunciados aseverativos del español de contacto de la comunidad de San Miguel Canoa, Puebla, y b), demostrar la relación que existe entre estos acentos tonales y variables sociales como el género, la edad, el nivel educativo y el bilingüismo de los colaboradores. El análisis de estos enunciados de habla semiespontánea mostró que i) se trata de una variedad que privilegia el uso de acentos tonales con picos (muy) tempranos, como H*, L+H* y L+>H*, tanto en posición prenuclear como nuclear, ii) que los tonemas L+H* L% y L+>H* L%, reforzados por upstep en algunos casos, caracterizan a los aseverativos de foco amplio, estrecho y contrastivo en esta variedad de español, y iii) que el uso de los acentos tonales cuyo pico se alcanza tempranamente está en correlación con personas adultas o de mayor edad, que tienen un bajo o ningún nivel educativo y que son por lo general bilingües náhuatl-español. Estos hallazgos contribuyen a la investigación sobre contacto prosódico y a la prosodia del español mexicano.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to ...inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual level, but how does it start? What manifestation of linguistic knowledge does it affect? This study traced this innovative use of DOM in oral production, grammaticality judgments and on-line comprehension (reading task with eye-tracking) in the Spanish of Mexico. Thirty-four native speakers (ages 18–22) from the southeast of Mexico participated in the study. Results showed that the incidence of the innovative use of DOM with inanimate objects varied by task: DOM innovations were detected in on-line processing more than in grammaticality judgments and oral production. Our results support the hypothesis that language variation and change may start with on-line comprehension.
If vegetables could talk Carranza, Ariel Vázquez
Discourse studies,
12/2017, Letnik:
19, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The present investigation studies buying and selling encounters in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop. It is a conversation-analytic study that shows aspects of the institutional character of these ...interactions, their overall organisation and sequential structure. It suggests that the core sequential structure of these encounters consists of two base adjacency pairs, buying (requesting–giving a product) and selling (requesting–giving money). In particular, the analysis describes the preparatory characteristics of the pre-expansions that precede the product request formulations, the linguistic composition and sequential positioning of request formulations, the insertions of the buying adjacency pair and the sequencing of the commercial exchange which is described as the climax of the institutional event. The designs of the first pair part of the selling adjacency pair and the product request formulations are presented as clear instances of the referential framework or common ground shared by seller and customer.
Development of automatic speech recognition systems relies on the availability of distinct language resources such as speech recordings, pronunciation dictionaries, and language models. These ...resources are scarce for the Mexican Spanish dialect. In this work, we present a revision of the CIEMPIESS corpus that is a resource for spontaneous speech recognition in Mexican Spanish of Central Mexico. It consists of 17h of segmented and transcribed recordings, a phonetic dictionary composed by 53,169 unique words, and a language model composed by 1,505,491 words extracted from 2489 university newsletters. We also evaluate the CIEMPIESS corpus using three well known state of the art speech recognition engines, having satisfactory results. These resources are open for research and development in the field. Additionally, we present the methodology and the tools used to facilitate the creation of these resources which can be easily adapted to other variants of Spanish, or even other languages.
This study provides evidence for a binary contrast in the deictic system of Mexican Spanish. The analysis is based on experimental data on how native speakers interpret the adverbial demonstratives ...aquí/acá/ahí/allí/allá in a 3D virtual reality video game. The tests crossed the variables of distance, person, and anaphora. The results revealed that (i) when contrasting degrees of distance and anaphoric reference, ahí primarily has an anaphoric function, while aquí/acá/allí/allá primarily have a deictic function; (ii) acá/aquí designate proximal distances and the domain of the speaker; (iii) ahí designates the domain of the hearer in a person-oriented deixis; and (iv) the meaning of allí and allá cannot be explained by the deictic parameters of distance and person.
Abstract
Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a phenomenon widely attested in Spanish. In two experimental studies using
production and acceptability judgments we examined the extent to which Mexican ...Spanish presents some variation among monolingual
speakers with respect to expansion of DOM. We tested whether DOM with animate and specific objects is categorical in this variety,
and whether DOM is expanding to inanimate definite and indefinite objects as observed by diachronic studies of Mexican and other
Latin American varieties. We also tested DOM with other constructions: bare plurals, the verbs like
tener
and
haber
, small clauses and causative and perception verbs. Our study contributes new data documenting
linguistic variation in native speakers and confirms synchronic and diachronic analyses of DOM in Spanish.
Variationist research on subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish typically incorporates all grammatical persons/numbers into the same analysis, with important exceptions such as studies focusing ...exclusively on first-person singular (e.g., Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J Rubin (eds.),
, 329–349. Amsterdam, Salt Lake City: Benjamins 2004; Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation.
19. 101–135; Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation.
23(4). 711–748), third-person singular (Shin, Naomi Lapidus. 2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity.
26. 303–330), and third-person plural subjects (Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005. Overt nonspecific ellos in Spanish in New York.
2(2). 157–174). The current study is the first variationist analysis (to the best of my knowledge) to focus solely on first-person plural SPE. It is well-established that
exhibits one of the lowest rates of SPE relative to the other persons/numbers; however, factors conditioning its variation are less understood. Conversational corpus data from Mexican Spanish are employed to examine tokens of first-person plural SPE (
=660) in terms of frequency and constraints, incorporating factors such as TMA, switch reference, and verb class in logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that
, like other subjects, is strongly impacted by switch reference and tense-mood-aspect (TMA). However, the TMA effect is unique in that preterit aspect is shown to favor overt
relative to other TMAs, diverging from previous studies. Furthermore, verb class — a factor found to be repeatedly significant in the literature — is inoperative for
. These results suggest that
does not respond to the same factors as other persons/numbers. Additionally, the findings lend support to researchers regarding the importance of studying individual persons/numbers in subject variation research.
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