The present study aims to contribute to a better understanding of when and why bilingual speakers... more The present study aims to contribute to a better understanding of when and why bilingual speakers alternate between morphemes, words or structures of two languages – in particular Spanish and English – in a codeswitching context. Particularly, it looks into the diminutive system, which is very differently represented in both languages. Spanish has a highly productive diminutive system that can construct forms of various grammatical categories through a large inventory of affixes, while English is considered a language that does not have many diminutive affixes but mostly turns to analytical lexical items (e.g. little). In a Spanish-English codeswitching context, bilingual speakers depend on both grammatical systems to express a diminutive. Despite its common occurrence and varied forms, no research has been done as yet on the use, form and function of the diminutive notion in this particular context. This article compares the diminutive formation in the work of two Latino writers, G...
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 35 (2021), 2021
The diminutive construction is formed and used differently in Spanish and English, which leads us... more The diminutive construction is formed and used differently in Spanish and English, which leads us to the question how this construction with different morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic characteristics in the input languages is governed in Spanish-English bilingual and codeswitching speech. Through the analysis of a dataset of diminutive constructions extracted from the Bangor Miami corpus, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how one and the same construction differently represented in the input languages is administered in bilingual contexts. As this is a first approach to studying diminutives in codeswitching, three well known structural codeswitching models serve as a primary theoretical tool against which the diminutive is tested. These are Poplack’s (1980) Universal Constraints, Myers-Scotton’s (2002) Matrix Language Frame Model, and Blom and Gumperz’ (1972) Metaphorical Codeswitching Framework. The results show that Miami bilinguals prefer the prototypical ...
Recent years have witnessed the development of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/VU), a ... more Recent years have witnessed the development of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/VU), a step-by-step protocol designed to identify metaphoricallyused words in discourse. However, MIP(VU)'s merits notwithstanding, the procedure poses a problem to scholars intending to use its output as the basis for a semantic field analysis involving a quantitative component. Depending on the research question, metaphor analysts may be interested in chunks of language situated above the procedure's standardized level of analysis (i.e., the lexical unit or lexeme), including phrases and sentences. Yet, attempts to decenter the method's exclusive focus on metaphor-related words have been the target of critique, among others on the grounds of their lack of clear unit-formation guidelines and, hence, their inconsistent unit of analysis and measurement. Drawing on data derived from a Spanish-language US-based newspaper's coverage of the migration program known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), this article describes challenges that analysts can run into when attempting to use a dataset containing atomized metaphor-related words as the input for subsequent quantitative semantic analyses. Its main methodological contribution consists in a proposal and illustration of three possible methods to extend the existing MIP(VU)-protocol in such a way as to allow it to capture metaphorical strings, on top of lexemes, in a reliable and systematic manner. The first two methods are procedural, and entail formulating a-priori grouping-directives based on the research question(s). One departs from semasiological criteria (Method 1) and the other takes an onomasiological approach (Method 2). The third method works bottom-up, involving the ad hoc grouping of lexemes and adding a descriptive parameter meant to keep track of grouping-decisions made by the analyst, thereby safeguarding transparency at all times.
... Record Details. Record ID, 372811. Record Type, bookChapter. Author, Renata Enghels [80100159... more ... Record Details. Record ID, 372811. Record Type, bookChapter. Author, Renata Enghels [801001598941] - Ghent University Renata.Enghels@UGent.be; Eugeen Roegiest [801000191330] - Ghent University Eugeen.Roegiest@UGent.be. ...
Eugeen Roegiest es profesor catedratico de linguistica romanica y espanola en la Facultad de Letr... more Eugeen Roegiest es profesor catedratico de linguistica romanica y espanola en la Facultad de Letras y Filosofia de la Universidad de Gante (Belgica). Asimismo es director del Centro de Idiomas Universitario y fundador del Posgrado en Comunicacion Empresarial Multilingue. Su linea de investigacion cientifica se centra principalmente en la sintaxis y la semantica de las estructuras argumentales, y ha dado lugar a numerosas publicaciones y participaciones en congresos internacionales. En ocasion de su 65 cumpleanos, este volumen fue redactado como muestra de gratitud y respeto por su labor cientifica y docente. Reune 29 contribuciones dedicadas a la linguistica hispanica, romanica y general, desde perspectivas muy diversas, tanto sincronicas y diacronicas, como comparativas.
Résumé/Abstract L'A. s' intérese dans cet article à la définition du nombre grammatical... more Résumé/Abstract L'A. s' intérese dans cet article à la définition du nombre grammatical en français et en espagnol, et à l'étude des mécanismes de pluralisation. Il analyse plus particulièrement le fonctionnement du nombre dans deux phénomènes particuliers, à ...
Research into the persuasive quality of metaphor has a long standing tradition, with the topic of... more Research into the persuasive quality of metaphor has a long standing tradition, with the topic of migration embodying one of its pet discourse genres. Yet, only few studies have recognized the existence of identical metaphors occurring across the ideological divide. The present paper explores the way in which three US-based news outlets with broadly different group alignments and overall attitudes in relation to the issue of migration wield metaphor to frame the Mexican migration debate in the US. The data suggests that, contrary to what one might expect, the mayor point of variation between these news instances does not consist in a predilection for idiosyncratic source domains. Rather, the three news sources appear to diverge most significantly in their situational use of similar metaphors. On a methodological plane, this case study illustrates the necessity of inspecting metaphor frames more closely, attending to their semantic roles and broader context, if we want to make assert...
The present study aims to contribute to a better understanding of when and why bilingual speakers... more The present study aims to contribute to a better understanding of when and why bilingual speakers alternate between morphemes, words or structures of two languages – in particular Spanish and English – in a codeswitching context. Particularly, it looks into the diminutive system, which is very differently represented in both languages. Spanish has a highly productive diminutive system that can construct forms of various grammatical categories through a large inventory of affixes, while English is considered a language that does not have many diminutive affixes but mostly turns to analytical lexical items (e.g. little). In a Spanish-English codeswitching context, bilingual speakers depend on both grammatical systems to express a diminutive. Despite its common occurrence and varied forms, no research has been done as yet on the use, form and function of the diminutive notion in this particular context. This article compares the diminutive formation in the work of two Latino writers, G...
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 35 (2021), 2021
The diminutive construction is formed and used differently in Spanish and English, which leads us... more The diminutive construction is formed and used differently in Spanish and English, which leads us to the question how this construction with different morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic characteristics in the input languages is governed in Spanish-English bilingual and codeswitching speech. Through the analysis of a dataset of diminutive constructions extracted from the Bangor Miami corpus, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how one and the same construction differently represented in the input languages is administered in bilingual contexts. As this is a first approach to studying diminutives in codeswitching, three well known structural codeswitching models serve as a primary theoretical tool against which the diminutive is tested. These are Poplack’s (1980) Universal Constraints, Myers-Scotton’s (2002) Matrix Language Frame Model, and Blom and Gumperz’ (1972) Metaphorical Codeswitching Framework. The results show that Miami bilinguals prefer the prototypical ...
Recent years have witnessed the development of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/VU), a ... more Recent years have witnessed the development of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/VU), a step-by-step protocol designed to identify metaphoricallyused words in discourse. However, MIP(VU)'s merits notwithstanding, the procedure poses a problem to scholars intending to use its output as the basis for a semantic field analysis involving a quantitative component. Depending on the research question, metaphor analysts may be interested in chunks of language situated above the procedure's standardized level of analysis (i.e., the lexical unit or lexeme), including phrases and sentences. Yet, attempts to decenter the method's exclusive focus on metaphor-related words have been the target of critique, among others on the grounds of their lack of clear unit-formation guidelines and, hence, their inconsistent unit of analysis and measurement. Drawing on data derived from a Spanish-language US-based newspaper's coverage of the migration program known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), this article describes challenges that analysts can run into when attempting to use a dataset containing atomized metaphor-related words as the input for subsequent quantitative semantic analyses. Its main methodological contribution consists in a proposal and illustration of three possible methods to extend the existing MIP(VU)-protocol in such a way as to allow it to capture metaphorical strings, on top of lexemes, in a reliable and systematic manner. The first two methods are procedural, and entail formulating a-priori grouping-directives based on the research question(s). One departs from semasiological criteria (Method 1) and the other takes an onomasiological approach (Method 2). The third method works bottom-up, involving the ad hoc grouping of lexemes and adding a descriptive parameter meant to keep track of grouping-decisions made by the analyst, thereby safeguarding transparency at all times.
... Record Details. Record ID, 372811. Record Type, bookChapter. Author, Renata Enghels [80100159... more ... Record Details. Record ID, 372811. Record Type, bookChapter. Author, Renata Enghels [801001598941] - Ghent University Renata.Enghels@UGent.be; Eugeen Roegiest [801000191330] - Ghent University Eugeen.Roegiest@UGent.be. ...
Eugeen Roegiest es profesor catedratico de linguistica romanica y espanola en la Facultad de Letr... more Eugeen Roegiest es profesor catedratico de linguistica romanica y espanola en la Facultad de Letras y Filosofia de la Universidad de Gante (Belgica). Asimismo es director del Centro de Idiomas Universitario y fundador del Posgrado en Comunicacion Empresarial Multilingue. Su linea de investigacion cientifica se centra principalmente en la sintaxis y la semantica de las estructuras argumentales, y ha dado lugar a numerosas publicaciones y participaciones en congresos internacionales. En ocasion de su 65 cumpleanos, este volumen fue redactado como muestra de gratitud y respeto por su labor cientifica y docente. Reune 29 contribuciones dedicadas a la linguistica hispanica, romanica y general, desde perspectivas muy diversas, tanto sincronicas y diacronicas, como comparativas.
Résumé/Abstract L'A. s' intérese dans cet article à la définition du nombre grammatical... more Résumé/Abstract L'A. s' intérese dans cet article à la définition du nombre grammatical en français et en espagnol, et à l'étude des mécanismes de pluralisation. Il analyse plus particulièrement le fonctionnement du nombre dans deux phénomènes particuliers, à ...
Research into the persuasive quality of metaphor has a long standing tradition, with the topic of... more Research into the persuasive quality of metaphor has a long standing tradition, with the topic of migration embodying one of its pet discourse genres. Yet, only few studies have recognized the existence of identical metaphors occurring across the ideological divide. The present paper explores the way in which three US-based news outlets with broadly different group alignments and overall attitudes in relation to the issue of migration wield metaphor to frame the Mexican migration debate in the US. The data suggests that, contrary to what one might expect, the mayor point of variation between these news instances does not consist in a predilection for idiosyncratic source domains. Rather, the three news sources appear to diverge most significantly in their situational use of similar metaphors. On a methodological plane, this case study illustrates the necessity of inspecting metaphor frames more closely, attending to their semantic roles and broader context, if we want to make assert...
Cruzando fronteras: español e inglés en contacto..., 2021
El cap. presenta un estado de la cuestión de la hostilidad que sufre lo hispano y el español part... more El cap. presenta un estado de la cuestión de la hostilidad que sufre lo hispano y el español particularmente durante el mandado presidencial de Trump
Spanglish: Current Issues, Future Perspectives, and Linguistic Insights - Oxford Handbooks, 2018
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance ... more This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the
This chapter studies a series of important issues concerning Spanglish as a hybrid language. It d... more This chapter studies a series of important issues concerning Spanglish as a hybrid language. It discusses why Spanglish has constituted a growing topic of interest ever since it first attracted the attention of specialists, be it from a linguistic, literary, or social- cultural perspective. The study also discusses the main challenges Spanglish is expected to be confronted with in the (near) future given that, more than ever, the identity of its speakers is at stake. A final part argues in favor of the maintenance of Spanglish as a unique form of bilingualism. By adopting a cognitive and functional viewpoint on language, it is shown that the analysis of Spanglish grammar offers insights into the main characteristics of human language, including basic principles such as iconicity, economy, creativity, and productivity.
Conferencias: El español y el spanglish en la era de Trump, Universidad de Gante, 21 de noviembre... more Conferencias: El español y el spanglish en la era de Trump, Universidad de Gante, 21 de noviembre (Bruselas 22 de noviembre) 2017
Language change in the 20th century: exploring microdiachronic evolutions in Romance Languages, 2023
The 20 th century is characterized by important changes in the sociohistorical context of Spain, ... more The 20 th century is characterized by important changes in the sociohistorical context of Spain, which have led to the steady process of colloquialization of Spanish, in both spoken and written language. Still, these major developments contrast sharply with the scarcity of oral conversational data. This paper investigates whether the apparent-time construct offers a solution for the data problem. According to this method, a linguistic phenomenon is analyzed across the speech of different generations during one time period. The basic assumption is that differences between generations mirror historical developments in language. This study investigates whether generational differences in the use of the Spanish pragmatic marker sabes 'you know' corresponds to the grammaticalization cline previously observed in real-time data.
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