Maintenance or loss of dialect Andalusian features: Internal and external factors

In the last sixty years a steadily maintained process of convergence towards the Castilian national standard has been occurring in Southern Spain affecting urban middle-class speakers’ varieties, particularly phonology and lexis. As a consequence, unmarked features characterising innovative southern pronunciation have become less frequent and, at the same time, certain standard marked features have been adapted to the southern phonemic inventory. Then, urban middle-class varieties have progressively been stretching out the distance separating them from working-class and rural varieties, and bringing them closer to central Castilian varieties. Intermediate, yet incipient koineised varieties have been described including also transitional Murcia and Extremadura dialects (Hernández & Villena 2009, Villena, Vida & von Essen 2015). (1) Some of the standard phonologically marked features have spread out among southern speakers exclusively based on their mainstream social prestige and producing not only changes in obstruent phoneme inventory –i.e. acquisition of /s/ vs. /θ/ contrast, but also standstill and even reversion of old consonant push- or pull-chain shifts –e.g. /h/ or /d/ fortition, affricate /ʧ/, etc. as well as traditional lexis shift (Villena et al. 2016). Internal (grammar and word frequency) and external (stratification, network and style) factors constraining those features follow similar patterns in the Andalusian speech communities analysed so far (Granada, Malaga) but when we zoom in on central varieties, which are closer to the national standard and then more conservative, differences in frequency increase and conflict sites emerge. (2) Unmarked ‘natural’ phonological features characterising southern dialects, particularly deletion of syllable-final consonant, do not keep pace with this trend of convergence towards the standard. Thus a combination of southern innovative syllable-final and standard conservative onset-consonant features coexist. (3). The main idea is that this intermediate variety is formed through changes suggesting that Andalusian speakers look for the best way of accepting marked prestige features without altering coherence within their inventory. Either reorganisation of the innovative phonemic system in such a way that it may include Castilian and standard /s/ vs. /θ/ contrast or re-syllabification of aspirated /s/ before dental stop are excellent examples of how and why linguistic features are able to integrate intermediate varieties between the dialect-standard continuum.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Cross-lingual Linking on the Multilingual Web of Data (position statement)

Recently, the Semantic Web has experienced signi�cant advancements in standards and techniques, as well as in the amount of semantic information available online. Even so, mechanisms are still needed to automatically reconcile semantic information when it is expressed in di�erent natural languages, so that access to Web information across language barriers can be improved. That requires developing techniques for discovering and representing cross-lingual links on the Web of Data. In this paper we explore the different dimensions of such a problem and reflect on possible avenues of research on that topic

New technologies and educational measurement

The effects the new technologies have had on current educational measurement are reviewed. They relate to most of the tasks involved in an educational measurement process. The specific topics considered are: innovative items, performance assessment, automatic test assembly, automatic item generation and different types of computerized adaptive testing. Technology has also changed the psychometric analysis of item and test data, as there are now available computer programs for most psychometric tasks, as item calibration, differential item and test functioning, the study of model fit and model assumptions…Technology has also affected the way to do research, as the use of Monte Carlo methods is becoming more and more common. It is concluded that in general technology is pushing educational measurement in the right direction. However, it should be kept in mind that these innovations may lose their true meaning if they do not really improve the metric quality of the assessment.El artículo revisa algunos cambios que la informatización ha producido en la medición educativa actual. Todas las fases de la evaluación mediante tests se han visto en mayor o menor medida afectadas por las nuevas tecnologías. Los cambios expresamente comentados son los ítems innovadores, los tests de desempeño, el ensamblaje automático, la generación automática de ítems y varios tipos de tests adaptativos informatizados. La informatización ha introducido cambios también en el tratamiento psicométrico de los datos, con la aparición de programas de ordenador para tareas como la calibración, la determinación del sesgo de los ítems y tests, el estudio de los supuestos y del ajuste de los modelos… y ha cambiado también la manera de investigar, siendo más y más frecuente la aplicación del método de Monte Carlo. Se concluye que los cambios están impulsando la medición educativa en la dirección correcta. No obstante, existe el riesgo de olvidar que estas innovaciones pierden su verdadero sentido si no consiguen mejorar la calidad métrica de la evaluación.El autor agradece al Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (proyecto PSI2008-0-1685) y al Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento (cátedra de Patrocinio MAP) la financiación recibida

Estudio metafórico de tres “pecados capitales”: la lujuria, la envidia y la ira

Muchas son ya las investigaciones en lingüística cognitiva (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 1986; Lakoff, 1987; Roldán, 1999; Deignan, 2005) que afirman que las metáforas no son sólo figuras retóricas, sino que impregnan nuestra vida diaria, y no están presentes tan sólo en el lenguaje, sino que dominan nuestro pensamiento y forma de actuar. En algo tan cotidiano como son las emociones recurrimos a la metáfora para expresar lo que sentimos, aunque en algunos casos éstas están tan lexicalizadas que no somos conscientes de su uso. Este trabajo de investigación se centra en el análisis metafórico de tres emociones negativas, la lujuria, la envidia y la ira, tres emociones incluidas en el grupo de los llamados “pecados capitales”. El objetivo de este trabajo es describir la estructura conceptual que subyace a dichas emociones tomando como base la Teoría Conceptual de la Metáfora, teoría que desarrollan Lakoff y Johnson en su obra Metaphors We Live By (1980) y que ha sido de gran relevancia para el estudio del pensamiento y del lenguaje metafóricos (Deignan, 2005). La hipótesis de la que parte este estudio es que las emociones negativas de la envidia, la ira y la lujuria se sustentan en metáforas expresadas mediante verbos de acción realizados por seres vivos o fuerzas externas. Para confirmar esta hipótesis se parte del análisis lingüístico del uso de dichas emociones en el Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) de la Real Academia de la Lengua

Nourishing the Mind: Food Symbolism and Mental Health in The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical novel that explores the protagonist Esther Greenwood’s struggles with mental illness, societal expectations, and personal ambitions in 1950s America. This paper analyzes how Esther's interactions with food reflect her changing mental state and the cultural constraints she faces as a woman. Detailed descriptions of food serve as a literary device to convey Esther's inner conflicts, such as her inability to choose a life path and her desire to rebel against gender norms. Moreover, the metaphor of the fig tree, which is one of the most relevant passages in the novel, encapsulates Esther's anxieties about the future and the impossibility of balancing different life choices. Ultimately, Plath uses food and metaphorical languages to weaves a complex story about identity, societal expectations, and the pursuit of personal ambitions

Coherence in ongoing varieties. The effect of mesosocial and small-scale variables on the use of the intermediate (standard/vernacular) variety in southern Spain.

This paper addresses some questions regarding coherence within ongoing urban varieties, such as the one boosted by urban middle-class speakers from southern Spain since the fifties of the 20th century (Villena and Vida 2017, 2018). The main issues we focus on here are (1) whether covariation and coherence actually exist within a variety which has primarily emerged on the basis of correction and levelling of vernacular features, and (2) to what extent it is feasible to build a multivariate model able to depict interaction between the macrosocial, mesocial and small-scales variables underlying the speaker’s use of the new variety.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Enriching Ontologies with Multilingual Information

Multilinguality in ontologies has become an impending need for institutions worldwide that have to deal with data and linguistic resources in different natural languages. Since most ontologies are developed in one language, obtaining multilingual ontologies implies to localize or adapt them to a concrete language and culture community. As the adaptation of the ontology conceptualization demands considerable efforts, we propose to modify the ontology terminological layer by associating an external repository of linguistic data to the ontology. With this aim we provide a model called Linguistic Information Repository (LIR) that associated to the ontology meta-model allows terminological layer localization