Estudios acerca del establecimiento de conexiones entre enunciados hablados: ¿qué pueden contribuir a la promoción de la construcción de una representación coherente del discurso por parte de los estudiantes?

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of how the establishment of discourse connections among spoken statements has been studied by approaches to discourse analysis and psycholinguistic studies, in order to highlight what variables appear to be important for understanding how comprehension of spoken discourse can be facilitated. The consideration of discourse analysis approaches allows us to think about the role of the establishment of discourse connections among speech acts in the classroom, the uses of contextualization cues by bilingual students, the identification of social and cultural notions in teachers’ discourse, and the interactional effects of teachers’ interventions. Preliminary psycholinguistic studies contribute to our understanding of the role of establishing causal connections and integrating adjacent statements through the presence of discourse markers in the comprehension of spoken discourse by college students. The results of these approaches and studies provide insight into students’ comprehension of classroom discourse, and hold the potential for implications for instruction.El propósito de este artículo es realizar un recorrido a través de enfoques de análisis del discurso y estudios de psicolingüística que han investigado el establecimiento de conexiones entre enunciados hablados, a fin de destacar las variables que parecen ser centrales para facilitar la comprensión. La consideración de los enfoques del análisis del discurso nos permitirán pensar acerca del rol del establecimiento de conexiones entre actos del lenguaje en el aula, las funciones de las claves de contextualización, la identificación de las nociones sociales y culturales en el discurso de los profesores, los efectos de las intervenciones de los profesores en la interacción con los estudiantes. Los estudios preliminares de psicolingüística contribuirán a nuestra comprensión del rol del establecimiento de conexiones causales e integración de enunciados adyacentes a través de marcadores del discurso por parte de estudiantes universitarios. La consideración de estos enfoques y estudios nos ayudarán a pensar acerca de las contribuciones que sus propuestas y métodos pueden hacer al enriquecimiento de nuestro entendimiento de cómo los estudiantes comprenden el discurso producido durante las clases.Fil: Yomha Cevasco, Jazmin. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Broek, Paul van den. Leiden University; Países Bajo

Non-Standard and Minority Varieties as Community Languages in the UK: Towards a New Strategy for Language Maintenance

Supplementary schools (also referred to as complementary or Saturday schools) play a key role in teaching community heritage languages. In this way they contribute to strengthening awareness of cultural identity and confidence among pupils of migrant and minority backgrounds. The diaspora setting poses a number of challenges: parents and pupils expect supplementary schools to provide instruction in formal aspects of the heritage languages (reading and writing, and ‘correct’ grammar), but also to help develop competence in using the language in everyday settings, not least in order to enable intergenerational communication. Where the formal language differs from non-standard speech varieties (such as regional dialects), gaps may emerge between expectations and delivery. Most schools do not equip teachers to address such issues because the traditional curricula (including textbooks and teacher training packages that are often imported from the origin countries) fail to take them into consideration. The paper draws on recent research by specialist sociolinguists working in various UK settings and on a discussion among researchers and practitioners that was hosted by the University of Westminster in April 2019, co-organised by the Multilingual Manchester research unit at the University of Manchester as part of the Multilingual Communities strand of the AHRC Open World Research Initiative consortium ‘Cross- Language Dynamics: Re-shaping Communities.’ Research has shown that teachers, parents and pupils attribute importance to the teaching of standard languages, not least as a way of gaining additional formal qualifications and increasing prospects of university admission and employment. However, pupils also show an interest in everyday speech varieties and often challenge the prevailing language ideologies that fail to recognise their importance in informal communication. Teachers tend to be aware of this tension but lack the training and resources to address it in the classroom. The workshop findings suggest that failure to take non-standard speech varieties into consideration can discourage pupils from attending supplementary schools and so it also risks having an adverse effect on the transmission of standard heritage languages. Pupils’ motivation can be boosted if they are offered more tools and opportunities to communicate in everyday speech varieties. To that end, non-standard varieties must be valorised and teachers should be equipped with the skills to address language variation and pupils’ multilingual repertoires and to promote them as valuable communicative resources. The paper recommends that supplementary schools should explore ways to take into account pupils’ multilingualism and use of non-standard varieties. Curricula should be adjusted to recognise non- standard varieties as valuable resources while continuing to teach the formal (standard) varieties. Teacher training modules should be designed that take pupils’ multilingual repertoires into account and equip teachers to understand and address sociolinguistic issues such as structural variation, multilingualism and language ideologies. The paper also recommends public engagement to address the inequality that underpins the use of the terms ‘community’ versus ‘modern languages’, and calls for collaboration between mainstream (statutory) schools and supplementary schools when it comes to celebrating diversity in their pupils’ backgrounds. Academics should play a greater role in providing advice, support and training to practitioners. They should work with practitioners and stakeholders to raise public awareness of the contribution that supplementary schools make and to develop policies and pedagogical approaches to support them

Les eines computacionals i el disseny de corpus orals: un diàleg vigent

The design of an oral corpus and the processes of registering, codifying and treating the materials in order to build a useful resource for linguistic analysis prompt numerous decisions regarding theory and methodology. This article is focused on those stages of corpus construction which are more clearly conditioned by the computational processing necessary to make it functional. In order to adequately match the initial expectations and the real possibilities of using the tool, each feature we intend to codify must be measured against the workload and the means required to do so. Therefore, it is essential to take into account the available possibilities of processing and exploitation as they have a crucial impact on decisions regarding the corpus’ construction. Based on experience acquired in the construction of the ESLORA corpus, the present article looks into some of the problems arising in the process of designing an oral corpus, such as the delicacy with which oral phenomena are represented, the segmentation of the discourse, the coexistence of different simultaneous tagging systems and the particularities of annotation in a bilingual or multilingual contextEl disseny d’un corpus oral i els processos de registrar, codificar i tractar els materials per construir un recurs útil per a l’anàlisi lingüística, comporta nombroses decisions pel que fa a la teoria i la metodologia. Aquest article s’ocupa d’aquelles etapes de la construcció d’un corpus que més clarament estan condicionades pel processament informàtic necessari que ha de fer el corpus funcional. Per tal de conjugar les expectatives inicials i les possibilitats reals quan usem l’eina, cada característica que pretenem codificar ha de ser mesurada quant a la càrrega de treball que comporta i els mitjans que són requerits per fer-ho possible. Per això, és essencial tenir en compte els recursos disponibles a l’hora de processar i explotar el corpus, ja que tenen un impacte fonamental en les decisions pel que fa a la construcció del corpus. Basat en l’experiència adquirida en la construcció del corpus ESLORA, l’article analitza alguns dels problemes que sorgeixen en el procés de dissenyar un corpus oral, com ara el grau de detall en què és representat el fenomen oral, la segmentació del discurs, la convivència de diferents sistemes d’etiquetatge simultanis i les particularitats de l’anotació en un context bilingüe o multilingüeThis study was financed by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) ‘Spanish State Research Agency’ and by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (European Regional Development Fund) through the ESLORA+ project (FFI2017-86379-P). The authors are members of the research group Gramática del español ‘Spanish Grammar’ from the University of Santiago de Compostela, which has been awarded a grant for the Strengthening and Organisation of Research Groups with Potential for Growth by the Regional Government’s Education Department (ED431B 2017/39). The study has also benefited from the participation of the ESLORA project in the Red temática en estudios de Análisis del Discurso (FFI2017-90738-REDT)S

Computational tools and spoken corpora design: an ongoing dialogue

The design of an oral corpus and the processes of registering, codifying and treating the materials in order to build a useful resource for linguistic analysis prompt numerous decisions regarding theory and methodology. This article is focused on those stages of corpus construction which are more clearly conditioned by the computational processing necessary to make it functional.  In order to adequately match the initial expectations and the real possibilities of using the tool, each feature we intend to codify must be measured against the workload and the means required to do so. Therefore, it is essential to take into account the available possibilities of processing and exploitation as they have a crucial impact on decisions regarding the corpus’ construction. Based on experience acquired in the construction of the ESLORA corpus, the present article looks into some of the problems arising in the process of designing an oral corpus, such as the delicacy with which oral phenomena are represented, the segmentation of the discourse, the coexistence of different simultaneous tagging systems and the particularities of annotation in a bilingual or multilingual context

Modeling the life and death of competing languages from a physical and mathematical perspective

Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology and share some underlying ideas -- e. g. the search for minimal schemes to explain complex situations or the notion that languages are extant entities in a societal context and, accordingly, that objective, mathematical laws emerge driving the aforementioned dynamics. Different proposals pay attention to distinct aspects of such systems: Some of them emphasize the distribution of the population in geographical space, others research exhaustively the role of bilinguals in idealized situations (e. g. isolated populations), and yet others rely extremely on equations taken unchanged from physics or biology and whose parameters bear actual geometrical meaning. Despite the sources of these models -- so unrelated to linguistics -- sound results begin to surface that establish conditions and make testable predictions regarding language survival within populations of speakers, with a decisive role reserved to bilingualism. Here we review the most recent works and their interesting outcomes stressing their physical theoretical basis, and discuss the relevance and meaning of the abstract mathematical findings for real-life situations.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures. Fifth chapter of the book Bilingualism and Minority Languages in Europe: Current trends and developments by F. Lauchlan, M. C. Parafita Couto, ed

THE IMPORTANCE OF MT FOR THE SURVIVAL OF MINORITY LANGUAGES: SPANISH-GALICIAN MT SYSTEM

Our society is coming through a lot of changes that are connected, basically, with information. Maybe those languages that are present in this challenge will survive, and languages that will not meet those changes will dissapear. The Linguistics section of the Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a Investigación en Humanidades (CRP) is devoted to the development of basic language resources for Galician for trying to solve the gap existing in computational resources and to made it possible for Galician to be present in the new information society. The aim of this paper is to explain how we have developed a Spanish-Galician Machine Translation system, what tools we have made use of, which difficulties we have found in our task and what are the final results of the project

The tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués. A galician and portuguese word bank

O proxecto internacional Tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués ten como obxectivo constituír un portal de léxico dialectal que reúna nunha mesma ferramenta informática materiais lexicográficos procedentes de Brasil, Galicia e Portugal. Este portal dialectal permitirá o acceso inmediato, através da internet e de modo gratuíto, a unha gran cantidade de datos lexicográficos, moitos deles aínda inéditos e de difícil acceso para os investigadores. A información léxica introducida no Tesouro está debidamente lematizada, clasificada semanticamente e xeoUreferenciada, polo que é posible obter resultados debidamente agrupados e xerar a representación cartográfica correspondente. Ademais do obvio interese para as investigacións de tipo dialectal e lexicográfico, o Tesouro fornecerá material de utilidade para pescudas onomasiolóxicas, de lingüística histórica, etimolóxicas e morfolóxicas, por citar algúns exemplos. Do mesmo modo, esta ferramenta tamén poderá ser aproveitada para estudos de tipo etnográfico e histórico, xa que pon ó alcance da comunidade científica moita información sobre o patrimonio material e inmaterial tradicional dos tres países, moi ameazado polo cambio nas formas de vida ocorridos nas últimas décadas.The international project Tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués (Thesaurus of the Galician and Portuguese heritage lexicon) aims to be a cross-dialectal lexical portal bringing together lexicographical material from Brazil, Galicia and Portugal in a single computer tool. This dialect portal will give direct access via Internet, free of charge, to a large body of lexicographical data much of which has until now remained unpublished and hard for researchers obtain. The lexical information in the Tesouro is fully lemmatized, semantically classified and geographically referenced, making it possible to obtain usefully grouped search results and generating a map representation corresponding to each data set. Besides its obvious value to dialect researchers and lexicographers, the Tesouro will also provide useful material for the study of names, historical linguistics, etymology, morphology and so on. This tool might also be exploited in ethnographical and historical research since it makes available to the scientific community a large amount of information about the inherited traditions, both material and immaterial, of all three countries, much of which is endangered on account of recent changes in traditional ways of life