Sobre conectores, expletivos y muletillas

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Un solo tipo de reformulación

Frente a la opinión, ampliamente compartida, de que existen dos tipos de reformulación, este artículo defiende la existencia de un único tipo de reformulación. La reformulación se propone como una operación de disociación entre dos formulaciones que tiene, como categorías vecinas, la paráfrasis, por un lado, y la corrección, por el otro. La reformulación, por tanto, no sería ni la una ni la otra. Asimismo, se separaría de la noción de conclusión, con la que también se ha asociado. Esta visión de la reformulación parece coherente con lo que los datos diacrónicos muestran. This paper claims, contrary to a commonly shared assumption, that there exists only one type of reformulation. Reformulation is seen here as a dissociative operation between two formulations and has two neighbouring categories: on the one hand, paraphrase; on the other, correction. Refomulation, then, is distinct from both of them. Reformulation should also be detached from conclusion, even though these two categories have been usually associated. The view of reformulation defended in this paper seems also coherent with what diachronic data show

La presencia de los enlaces extraoracionales en la tradición gramatical española: la descripción de algunas conjunciones. Otros valores conversacionales

It is commonly thought that the grammars written before this century contain no remarks about pragmatics. Consacrated to the description of the morphosintactic structure of language, the grammarians would have not been able to «go further» and enter into the realm of language in use. Nevertheless, a revision of the most important grammars of the Spanish tradition shows that this assumption is not entirely true. In the description of some of the most conspicuous connectives a flow of observations can be found, ranging from their textual-organization capacities to their uses in conversation. Against the commonly admited state-of-the-art, we claim for a new and broader revision of the pragmatic observations hidden in the syntactic descriptions of the Spanish grammarians

Evolución diacrónica de o sea

This paper analyses the diachronic evolution of the Spanish discourse marker o sea from its origins to present-day Spanish. Beginning with the free construction that gave rise to it, through a corpus study of its various evolutionary stages, this paper arrives at the connective and modal values that o sea currently possesses. The theoretical description that underpins our study rests on the grammaticalisation studies (especially those conducted by Elizabeth Traugott), the neo-Gricean theories, the Val.Es.Co. group's theory of discourse units and the studies on discursive traditions. Together, these offer a satisfactory integration of theoretical aspects internal to language change, structural information and philological aspects.Este trabajo analiza la evolución diacrónica del marcador del discurso o sea desde sus orígenes hasta la actualidad. Se partirá de la construcción libre que lo originó para llegar, a través de un estudio de corpus de sus diferentes fases evolutivas, a los valores conectivos y modales que posee en la actualidad. La descripción teórica que sustenta nuestro estudio descansa sobre los estudios de gramaticalización (especialmente los desarrollados por Elizabeth Traugott), las teorías neogriceanas, la teoría de unidades discursivas del grupo Val.Es.Co. y los estudios sobre tradiciones discursivas. Juntos, ofrecen una integraciónsatisfactoria de aspectos teóricos internos al cambio lingüístico,información estructural y aspectos filológicos

El siglo xx como diacronía: intuición y comprobación en el caso de o sea

Cuando la historia de la Lingüística ha tratado de reconstruir estados de lengua de épocas pretéritas se ha apoyado, con frecuencia, en las intuiciones lingüísticas de hablantes considerados prestigiosos. Dichas intuiciones se suponen, por lo general, válidas, lo que contrasta con las preven- ciones metodológicas hacia los juicios de valor realizados por hablantes en la sincronía actual. El periodo situado alrededor de 1950 representa un punto especialmente interesante para comprobar hasta qué punto la intuición del lingüista se ve validada por datos, ya que, por un lado, difiere en aspectos relevantes de la sincronía actual pero, por otro lado, está ampliamente documentado en corpus de referencia, como el CORDE. El presente artículo estudiará el alcance de esta cues- tión general a partir de las observaciones sobre la adquisición de valores modales en o sea realizadas por Emilio Lorenzo en 1997. La conclusión de este trabajo apoyará en general la intuición del lingüista, situará la evolución de o sea en un marco evolutivo y de gramaticalización general y, desarrollando la propuesta de Melis, Flores y Bogart, propondrá el siglo XX como spacio relevante para el estudio de la evolución diacrónica de, al menos, los marcadores del discurso.Diachronic research has often made use of metalinguistic remarks made by “prestigious” speakers as a way to reconstruct past stages of a given language. The question arises as to what point these remarks can be considered objective. This issue is addressed here by paying attention to the time span between 1940 and 1960 and to Emilio Lorenzo’s remarks about the evolution of Sp. o sea. Lorenzo’s intuitions can be (dis)confirmed by checking them against the RAE CORDE corpus. Building on the conclusions extracted from o sea, the last part of this paper establishes some methodological remarks re- garding the diachronic study of the 20th century

Cross-Identification Performance from Simulated Detections: GALEX and SDSS

We investigate the quality of associations of astronomical sources from multi-wavelength observations using simulated detections that are realistic in terms of their astrometric accuracy, small-scale clustering properties and selection functions. We present a general method to build such mock catalogs for studying associations, and compare the statistics of cross-identifications based on angular separation and Bayesian probability criteria. In particular, we focus on the highly relevant problem of cross-correlating the ultraviolet Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and optical Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) surveys. Using refined simulations of the relevant catalogs, we find that the probability thresholds yield lower contamination of false associations, and are more efficient than angular separation. Our study presents a set of recommended criteria to construct reliable cross-match catalogs between SDSS and GALEX with minimal artifacts.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures; ApJ in pres

Point field models for the galaxy point pattern. Modelling the singularity of the two-point correlation function

There is empirical evidence that the two-point correlation function of the galaxy distribution follows, for small scales, reasonably well a power-law expression $\xi(r)\propto r^{-\gamma}$ with $\gamma$ between 1.5 and 1.9. Nevertheless, most of the point field models suggested in the literature do not have this property. This paper presents a new class of models, which is produced by modifying point fields commonly used in cosmology to mimic the galaxy distribution, but where $\gamma=2$ is too large. The points are independently and randomly shifted, leading to the desired reduction of the value of $\gamma$.Comment: Inserted a missing part of the abstract; 8 pages, 6 figures, uses aa.cls and natbib.sty (included); accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

The best fit for the observed galaxy Counts-in-Cell distribution function

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the first dense redshift survey encompassing a volume large enough to find the best analytic probability density function that fits the galaxy Counts-in-Cells distribution $f_V(N)$, the frequency distribution of galaxy counts in a volume $V$. Different analytic functions have been previously proposed that can account for some of the observed features of the observed frequency counts, but fail to provide an overall good fit to this important statistical descriptor of the galaxy large-scale distribution. Our goal is to find the probability density function that better fits the observed Counts-in-Cells distribution $f_V(N)$. We have made a systematic study of this function applied to several samples drawn from the SDSS. We show the effective ways to deal with incompleteness of the sample (masked data) in the calculation of $f_V(N)$. We use LasDamas simulations to estimate the errors in the calculation. We test four different distribution functions to find the best fit: the Gravitational Quasi-Equilibrium distribution, the Negative Binomial Distribution, the Log Normal distribution and the Log Normal Distribution including a bias parameter. In the two latter cases, we apply a shot-noise correction to the distributions assuming the local Poisson model. We show that the best fit for the Counts-in-Cells distribution function is provided by the Negative Binomial distribution. In addition, at large scales the Log Normal distribution modified with the inclusion of the bias term also performs a satisfactory fit of the empirical values of $f_V(N)$. Our results demonstrate that the inclusion of a bias term in the Log Normal distribution is necessary to fit the observed galaxy Count-in-Cells distribution function.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Detecting Baryon Acoustic Oscillations

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations are a feature imprinted in the galaxy distribution by acoustic waves traveling in the plasma of the early universe. Their detection at the expected scale in large-scale structures strongly supports current cosmological models with a nearly linear evolution from redshift approximately 1000, and the existence of dark energy. Besides, BAOs provide a standard ruler for studying cosmic expansion. In this paper we focus on methods for BAO detection using the correlation function measurement. For each method, we want to understand the tested hypothesis (the hypothesis H0 to be rejected) and the underlying assumptions. We first present wavelet methods which are mildly model-dependent and mostly sensitive to the BAO feature. Then we turn to fully model-dependent methods. We present the most often used method based on the chi^2 statistic, but we find it has limitations. In general the assumptions of the chi^2 method are not verified, and it only gives a rough estimate of the significance. The estimate can become very wrong when considering more realistic hypotheses, where the covariance matrix of the measurement depends on cosmological parameters. Instead we propose to use a new method based on two modifications: we modify the procedure for computing the significance and make it rigorous, and we modify the statistic to obtain better results in the case of varying covariance matrix. We verify with simulations that correct significances are different from the ones obtained using the classical chi^2 procedure. We also test a simple example of varying covariance matrix. In this case we find that our modified statistic outperforms the classical chi^2 statistic when both significances are correctly computed. Finally we find that taking into account variations of the covariance matrix can change both BAO detection levels and cosmological parameter constraints

Measuring galaxy segregation using the mark connection function

(abridged) The clustering properties of galaxies belonging to different luminosity ranges or having different morphological types are different. These characteristics or `marks' permit to understand the galaxy catalogs that carry all this information as realizations of marked point processes. Many attempts have been presented to quantify the dependence of the clustering of galaxies on their inner properties. The present paper summarizes methods on spatial marked statistics used in cosmology to disentangle luminosity, colour or morphological segregation and introduces a new one in this context, the mark connection function. The methods used here are the partial correlation functions, including the cross-correlation function, the normalised mark correlation function, the mark variogram and the mark connection function. All these methods are applied to a volume-limited sample drawn from the 2dFGRS, using the spectral type as the mark. We show the virtues of each method to provide information about the clustering properties of each population, the dependence of the clustering on the marks, the similarity of the marks as a function of the pair distances, and the way to characterise the spatial correlation between the marks. We demonstrate by means of these statistics that passive galaxies exhibit stronger spatial correlation than active galaxies at small scales (r <20 Mpc/h). The mark connection function, introduced here, is particularly useful for understanding the spatial correlation between the marks.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic