Attitudes towards Euskera : using the matched-guise technique among school children in the Basque Country.

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Borderland identities and contemporary Spanish fiction

Ph.D. University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese 2003During the post-Franco period, national borders have constituted a subject of great debate in Spain. The country's reorganization into a state of autonomies in 1978 officially recognized distinct national entities within Spain while contentious negotiation over the extension and the limits of sovereignty has ensued until the present. Spain's membership in the European Union in 1986, emblematic of its newly established democracy and participation in the global marketplace, further transformed the nation's boundaries. Tensions mark the centripetal-centrifugal battle of globalization, as local or national concerns vie for advantage and supra-national alliances promote their interests. Although in theory the EU and globalization open up national borders to unrestricted movement of goods, capital, and people, in practice certain migrations are highly regulated and restricted. This is certainly the case for non-EU members and, particularly, for people from less developed nations. Nonetheless, Spain has seen a dramatic increase in immigration from areas with economic and political strife. These various border realignments and crossings have a profound impact on constructions of national and local community, ethnicity, and individual identity. My dissertation examines border crossings and borderlands created by these diverse political and social phenomena as imagined in contemporary Spanish fiction. Viewing literature as cultural practice, I read narratives, from the 1980s, 1990s, and the present decade, of Carme Riera (“Letra de ángel” and “Mon semblable, mon frère,” Contra el amor en compañía y otros relatos), Suso de Toro ( Calzados Lola and No Vuelvas), Cristina Fernández Cubas (El año de Gracia and “La flor de España,” El ángulo del horror), and Lourdes Ortiz (“Fátima de los naufragios” and “La piel de Marcelinda,” Fátima de los naufragios) as engaging in critical dialogues with dominant political policies. I take a cultural studies approach, drawing on anthropological, sociological, and historical sources and contemporary theory to illuminate my analyses of these fictional texts. Notions of postcolonial identity, borderland situations, and hybridity inform my work. I give unique application to these ideas, usually discussed in the context of former colonized nations, as I ground my writing in the particularity of borderlands and narratives of post-totalitarian Spain, a former colonizer

Exploring Cross-linguistic Effects and Phonetic Interactions in the Context of Bilingualism

This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research

The History of the Sibilants of Peninsular Spanish from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries

PhDIn an attempt to find a satisfactory and comprehensive explanation for the history of the sibilants in Peninsular Spanish, I explore the causal factors that were instrumental in motivating, promoting and diffusing the merger of voiced and voiceless sibilants. An investigation of these factors includes a discussion of language typology and universals, the acoustic qualities of the sibilant fricatives, issues surrounding phonemic mergers and dialect contact and mixing. In addition, I investigate the history of the sibilants, compare and contrast opposing views regarding that history and set forth those issues that have yet to receive a satisfactory explanation. Furthermore, I attempt to determine the geographical and chronological origins and the diffusion of this sound change by an orthographical investigation of several medieval documents and texts. In the final chapter, I tie together theory and data with the aim of giving a satisfactory and comprehensive exposition of the history of the sibilants in Peninsular Spanish. I conclude that the Spanish sibilants behave in keeping with the ideal observations set forth by the language universals examined in this thesis. The language-internal motivations include the ease in the articulation of voiceless sibilants in comparison to the voiced sibilants and the conditions that made the Old Spanish sibilants ripe for merger. Dialect mixing and contact and the weak ties within the social structure of medieval Spain are the language-external motivations that encouraged and promoted the sound merger and diffusion. With regard to the geographical and chronological history of the Spanish sibilants, I conclude that by the mid-thirteenth century, there is evidence of confusion of the /z/ and /s/ and by the end of the thirteenth century, neutralization of voice in the sibilants is widespread in all parts of Iberian Peninsula. There is possible evidence of seseo in Toledo as early as 1330 and in Soria in 1355. Evidence of the merger of [+voice] sibilants and [-voice] sibilants continues to mount throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In Central Spain, there is strong evidence of seseo in Madrid (1403-06), Peñafiel (1465) and Toledo (1438). and I, therefore, contend that early seseo is not exclusively Andalusian. By the mid-fifteenth century, there is possible evidence of merger of /z/ and /s/ in Southern Spain and by the sixteenth century, there is possible evidence of the merger Of /z/ and /s/ in Northern and Central Spain and possible evidence of zezeo and çeçeo in Southern Spain

Capturing the Moment. Identity and the Political in Narcís Comadira’s Poems

Narcís Comadira (Girona 1942 – ) started his studies in the monastery of Montserrat in the sixties but abandoned his religious career and became one of the youngest Catalans to join the then newly born Assemblea de Catalunya the activities of which extended over the period 1971-1977, escaping the claustrophobia of Franco’s Spain by going abroad as a Spanish Lector at Queen Mary’s College in London between 1971 and 1973, and thus discovering new ways of thinking and living. This paper explores Comadira’s personal, political and poetic development from 1970 to the years of the Spanish transition to Democracy

Translating Colloquial Registers in Catalan. A Case Study: The Translation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This thesis aims to find a model for translating colloquial registers into Catalan. Colloquial registers play an important part in literature today inasmuch as literature projects real life situations in which informal registers unfold. Many Catalan readers do not have a high regard for Catalan translations because established models for colloquial language do not reflect the way Catalan is spoken today, since there is a divorce between the linguistic norm and oral Catalan as a result of Castilian interference in informal registers. As a consequence, translations tend to be standardised and far from the spontaneous oral Catalan. In order to devise a flexible model for colloquial Catalan in translation, a text which contains a great deal of informal registers has been selected: Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The analysis of the sociolinguistic situation of the Catalan language and the position of translated literature in the Catalan system allows us to explain why the system is reluctant to change. Norms in the target culture and the principle of equivalence are explored as they prevent translators from shifting towards a model which accommodates Castilian words and expressions. With the aim of explaining why Catalan presents a particular problem in the translation of colloquial language, an analysis of both written and oral texts in English where colloquial registers have been translated into Catalan is carried out. In order to avoid a rigid model which follows the Catalan dictionary and grammar only, features of media oral registers have been applied to the translation of selected fragments of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This allows us to obtain a text which does not include Castilian terms and, at the same time, reproduces a neutral but more realistic colloquial Catalan.Institut Ramon Llul

The acquisition of L2 voiced stops by English learners of Spanish and Spanish learners of English

Previous studies investigating the acquisition of L2 stops have found a positive effect of L2 experience, but few have focused on voiced stops, particularly on prevoicing. This study investigates the acquisition of /b/ and /g/ by two populations, English learners of Spanish and Spanish learners of English. Three groups varying in amount of L2 experience (mainly length of residence, but also L2 use and L2 instruction) were investigated for each L1 population. Participants completed a carrier sentence reading task in their L1 and L2. Results showed that amount of L2 experience had a positive effect on L2 stop production, as the least experienced groups were outperformed by the experienced ones. No clear effect of L2 experience was observed on the L1, as learners did not differ from monolingual controls, but some differences between learner groups emerged. Moreover, overall, L2 learners were able to produce L1 and L2 stops differently, which indicates that their L1 and L2 categories were not merged. Still, the L1-English L2-Spanish speakers produced L2 stops more accurately than the L1-Spanish L2-English groups, suggesting that learning to rely on an existing L1 cue may be easier than learning to use a cue associated with a different L1 category