Analysis of ironical moments from Friends according to Relevance Theory

One of the most ambitious aspirations in Pragmatics has always been to procure an explanation for the act of communication and the commands that rule our cognitive capacity in general, and the exceptional figures of speech, such as irony, in particular. The prevailing Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson, which is the theoretical framework that this paper aims to apply, has numerous and influential antecedents, of which Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle is the most important. However, those theories have normally emphasized the theoretical dimension, since the examples shown by their authors have frequently been artificially conceived for fitting their purposes. This paper shows a more practical approach towards the selection and analysis of data by collecting ironical exchanges randomly extracted from the successful American sitcom Friends (Crane and Kauffman; 1994-2004) to carry out the analysis according to Sperber and Wilson’s theory. The analysis of the six heterogeneous extracts reveals that the entirety of the data fulfils the relevance theory’s requirements, so that all the ironical utterances can be interpreted with its help. This positive tendency to the observance of the theory in realistic data procures a hint of authenticity in the enforcement of Relevance Theory

International Business Email Communication in ELF (English as Lingua Franca)

E-mail correspondence has become one of the most useful ways for global communication, and more precisely for international business communication. As it is explained in the introductory section diverse studies of global communication in English have been carried out concerning ELF (English as lingua franca) and BELF (Business English as lingua franca). The purpose of this research is to bring to the forth the latest variation patters in business email communication in English. The study aims to analyze an authentic corpus of 90 emails written in English by business managers of different chemical companies set up in 14 different countries around the world, including native and non-native speakers of English who use this language as lingua franca for commercial and distribution purposes. The central research targets are to observe: first, the main register patterns of variation towards a more informal and conversational nature; secondly, the main communicative strategies to achieve the required communicative competence in BELF for international business purposes; and third, the prototypical move structure fluctuation from the standard structure of, for instance, business letters to a more relaxed pattern. The conclusions reveal an inclination towards a more informal, co-operative and goal-oriented international business email communication

La pertinencia de la instrucción diferenciada y las inteligencias múltiples al diseñar actividades para la clase de inglés como lengua extranjera: Programación Anual y Unidad Didáctica

En la tarea de diseño de actividades para la clase de inglés, la consideración de la instrucción diferenciada así como de la existencia distinta inteligencias resulta de gran importancia para los docentes en su deber de conocer y atender las necesidades individuales de los estudiantes y facilitar un aprendizaje efectivo, sobretodo teniendo en cuanta que la diversidad está muy presente en nuestra sociedad y las aulas son un reflejo de ésta

Becoming a reflective and sensitive teacher: a critical reflection of my own learning process

A reflection of my learning process along this Masters

MODELO DE CONTRATO DE DISTRIBUCIÓN EXCLUSIVA DE LA ICC

Resumen para el Trabajo Fin de Máster, Traducción de Textos Especializados El presente Trabajo Fin de Máster consiste en la traducción de un Contrato Modelo de Distribución Exclusiva de la ICC, y en una serie de apartados donde incluyo los comentarios que veo oportunos. En primer lugar, tenemos la introducción, donde explico las partes de mi trabajo. A continuación, tengo la traducción del contrato, ofreciendo una traducción lo más precisa posible y lo más fiel al texto origen (como se verá en el TFM, falta una cláusula en el texto origen, por lo que no he podido incluirla en mi texto final). Tras la traducción, tenemos una serie de comentarios, que es la teoría adquirida a lo largo del máster, aplicada al contrato del presente trabajo de forma específica, y al módulo de traducción legal de forma general. He intentado contextualizar el texto origen mediante los comentarios, y por ello he ofrecido un apartado que consiste en analizar el contrato como género textual, ofreciendo una definición para este tipo textual, y señalando las características que justifican que estamos ante un contrato. El resto de comentarios son más aplicados al texto como traducción, y consisten en los factores extra e intratextuales, así como la localización de problemas de traducción y las posibles estrategias que se pueden emplear para poder solucionarlo, así como un apartado que describe el proceso de revisión llevado a cabo. Por último, tenemos la conclusión y la lista de fuentes y bibliografía empleadas a lo largo del proceso de traducción y también para la realización de los comentarios

English as an Academic Lingua Franca in Spanish Tertiary Education: An Analysis of the use of Pragmatic Strategies in English-Medium LectureS.

Durante la última década, un cambio lingüístico ha sido especialmente notable en los contextos de educación superior debido al creciente uso del inglés como medio de instrucción (EMI) en las universidades europeas. Por ello, existe una innegable necesidad de saber más sobre las prácticas diarias de quienes participan en actividades académicas internacionales usando el inglés como vehículo de comunicación. Numerosos estudios se han realizado previamente en relación al inglés utilizado como lengua franca (ELF) en el ámbito académico. Sin embargo, existe una relativa falta de estudios empíricos sobre este uso del inglés en las universidades españolas en comparación con estudios similares en instituciones académicas europeas (Mauranen, 2006b; Björkman, 2010, 2011b, 2013). Esta investigación pretende estudiar las prácticas de inglés como medio de instrucción en diferentes disciplinas en la Universidad de Zaragoza (España), centrándose en el tipo de estrategias pragmáticas que utilizan los participantes para facilitar la comprensión. Estas prácticas lingüísticas son analizadas en este estudio con el fin de arrojar luz sobre el impacto que tiene el inglés en la eficacia comunicativa en estos entornos de enseñanza-aprendizaje.Los resultados derivan del análisis de un corpus de 12 clases magistrales impartidas en inglés como medio de instrucción que fueron grabadas en dos titulaciones diferentes. Estas se complementan con entrevistas semiestructuradas con los profesores y un pequeño corpus de diapositivas de presentaciones en formato PowerPoint que los mismos profesores utilizaron para impartir sus clases. Para analizar estos tres conjuntos de datos se ha utilizado un enfoque discursivo-pragmático y una metodología de orientación etnográfica. Por lo tanto, en este estudio se utiliza la triangulación de datos y la triangulación metodológica, ambas derivando en resultados tanto cuantitativos como cualitativos. Los resultados del estudio muestran 13 estrategias pragmáticas diferentes utilizadas en las sesiones magistrales grabadas para cumplir funciones comunicativas tales como potenciar la explicitud, aclarar y negociar el significado y/o el uso aceptable del lenguaje. El análisis de datos revela que las estrategias pragmáticas observadas en el corpus se utilizan principalmente para evitar posibles problemas comunicativos, pero también para remediar problemas de producción que obstaculizan abiertamente la comunicación y para co-construir la comprensión. Respaldando los estudios existentes sobre el inglés utilizado como lengua vehicular para la instrucción, los resultados revelan un uso altamente contextual y situacional de estrategias pragmáticas.<br /

Amino acid substitutions associated with treatment failure of hepatitis C virus infection

Trabajo presentado en el XVI Congreso Nacional de Virología, celebrado en Málaga (España) del 06 al 09 de septiembre de 2022.Despite the high sustained virological response rates achieved with current directly-acting antiviral agents (DAAs) against hepatitis C virus (HCV), around 2% to 5% of patients do not achieve such a response. Identification of amino acid substitutions associated with treatment failure requires analytical designs, such as subtype-specific ultra-deep sequencing (UDS) methods for HCV characterization and patient management. By deep sequencing analysis of 220 subtyped HCV samples from infected patients who failed therapy, collected from 39 Spanish hospitals, we determined amino acid sequences of the DAA-target proteins NS3, NS5A and NS5B, by UDS of HCV patient samples, in search of resistanceassociated substitutions (RAS). Using this procedure, we have identified six highly represented amino acid substitutions (HRSs) in NS5A and NS5B of HCV, which are not bona fide RAS. They were present frequently in basal and post-treatment virus of patients who failed therapy to different DAA-based therapies. Contrary to several RAS, HRSs belong to the acceptable subset of substitutions according to the PAM250 replacement matrix. Coherently, their mutant frequency, measured by the number of deep sequencing reads within the HCV quasispecies that encode the relevant substitutions, ranged between 90% and 100% in most cases. Also, they have limited predicted disruptive effects on the threedimensional structures of the proteins harboring them. The information on HRSs that will be gathered during sequencing should be relevant not only to help predict treatment outcomes and disease progression but also to further understand HCV population dynamics, which appears much more complex than thought prior to the introduction of deep sequencing.The work at CBMSO was supported by grants SAF2014-52400-R from MINECO, SAF2017-87846-R and BFU2017-91384-EXP MICIU, PI18/00210 from ISCIII, S2013/ABI-2906 (PLATESA) and S2018/BAA-4370 (PLATESA2) from Comunidad de Madrid/FEDER. C.P. is supported by the Miguel Servet program of the ISCIII (CP14/00121 and CPII19/00001), cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). CIBERehd is funded by ISCIII. Institutional grants from the Fundación Ramón Areces and Banco Santander to the CBMSO are also acknowledged. The team at CBMSO belongs to the Global Virus Network (GVN). The work in Barcelona was supported by ISCIII, cofinanced by ERDF grant number PI19/00301 and by the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) from the MICIU, grant number IDI20151125. Work at CAB was supported by MINECO grant BIO2016-79618R and PID2019-104903RB-I00 (funded by the EU under the FEDER program) and by the Spanish State research agency (AEI) through project number MDM-2017-0737 Unidad de Excelencia “María de Maeztu”-Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA). Work at IBMB was supported by MICIN grant BIO2017-83906-P (funded by the EU under the FEDER program). C.G.-C. is supported by predoctoral contract PRE2018-083422 from MICIU. B.M.-G. is supported by predoctoral contract PFIS FI19/00119 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo), cofinanced by Fondo Social Europeo (FSE).Peer reviewe

SARS-CoV-2 mutant spectra reveal differences between COVID-19 severity categories

Trabajo presentado en el XVI Congreso Nacional de Virología, celebrado en Málaga (España) del 06 al 09 de septiembre de 2022.RNA virus populations are composed of complex mixtures of genomes that are termed mutant spectra. SARS-CoV-2 replicates as a viral quasispecies, and mutations that are detected at low frequencies in a host can be dominant in subsequent variants. We have studied mutant spectrum complexities of SARS-CoV-2 populations derived from thirty nasopharyngeal swabs of patients infected during the first wave (April 2020) in the Hospital Universitario Fundación Jiménez Díaz. The patients were classified according to the COVID-19 severity in mild (non-hospitalized), moderate (hospitalized) and exitus (hospitalized with ICU admission and who passed away due to COVID-19). Using ultra-deep sequencing technologies (MiSeq, Illumina), we have examined four amplicons of the nsp12 (polymerase)-coding region and two amplicons of the spike-coding region. Ultra-deep sequencing data were analyzed with different cut-off frequency for mutation detection. Average number of different point mutations, mutations per haplotype and several diversity indices were significantly higher in SARS-CoV-2 isolated from patients who developed mild disease. A feature that we noted in the SARS-CoV-2 mutant spectra from diagnostic samples is the remarkable absence of mutations at intermediate frequencies, and an overwhelming abundance of mutations at frequencies lower than 10%. Thus, the decrease of the cut-off frequency for mutation detection from 0.5% to 0.1% revealed an increasement (50- to 100 fold) in the number of different mutations. The significantly higher frequency of mutations in virus from patients displaying mild than moderate or severe disease was maintained with the 0.1% cut- off frequency. To evaluate whether the frequency repertoire of amino acid substitutions differed between SARS-CoV-2 and the well characterized hepatitis C virus (HCV), we performed a comparative study of mutant spectra from infected patients using the same bioinformatics pipelines. HCV did not show the deficit of intermediate frequency substitutions that was observed with SARS-CoV-2. This difference was maintained when two functionally equivalent proteins, the corresponding viral polymerases, were compared. In conclusion, SARS-CoV-2 mutant spectra are rich reservoirs of mutants, whose complexity is not uniform among clinical isolates. Virus from patients who developed mild disease may be a source of new variants that may acquire epidemiological relevance.This work was supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spanish Ministry of Science and In-novation (COVID-19 Research Call COV20/00181), and co-financed by European Development Regional Fund ‘A way to achieve Europe’. The work was also supported by grants CSIC-COV19-014 from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), project 525/C/2021 from Fundació La Marató de TV3, PID2020-113888RB-I00 from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, BFU2017-91384-EXP from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MCIU), PI18/00210 and PI21/00139 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III, and S2018/BAA-4370 (PLATESA2 from Comunidad de Madrid/FEDER). C.P., M.C., and P.M. are supported by the Miguel Servet programme of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (CPII19/00001, CPII17/00006, and CP16/00116, respectively) co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). CIBERehd (Centro de Investi-gación en Red de Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivas) is funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Institutional grants from the Fundación Ramón Areces and Banco Santander to the CBMSO are also acknowledged. The team at CBMSO belongs to the Global Virus Network (GVN). B.M.-G. is supported by predoctoral contract PFIS FI19/00119 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo) cofinanced by Fondo Social Europeo (FSE). R.L.-V. is supported by predoctoral contract PEJD-2019-PRE/BMD-16414 from Comunidad de Madrid. C.G.-C. is sup-ported by predoctoral contract PRE2018-083422 from MCIU. BS was supported by a predoctoral research fellowship (Doctorados Industriales, DI-17-09134) from Spanish MINECO

SARS-CoV-2 Point Mutation and Deletion Spectra and Their Association with Different Disease Outcomes

Mutant spectra of RNA viruses are important to understand viral pathogenesis and response to selective pressures. There is a need to characterize the complexity of mutant spectra in coronaviruses sampled from infected patients. In particular, the possible relationship between SARS-CoV-2 mutant spectrum complexity and disease associations has not been established. In the present study, we report an ultradeep sequencing (UDS) analysis of the mutant spectrum of amplicons from the nsp12 (polymerase)- and spike (S)-coding regions of 30 nasopharyngeal isolates (diagnostic samples) of SARS-CoV-2 of the first COVID-19 pandemic wave (Madrid, Spain, April 2020) classified according to the severity of ensuing COVID-19. Low-frequency mutations and deletions, counted relative to the consensus sequence of the corresponding isolate, were overwhelmingly abundant. We show that the average number of different point mutations, mutations per haplotype, and several diversity indices was significantly higher in SARS-CoV-2 isolated from patients who developed mild disease than in those associated with moderate or severe disease (exitus). No such bias was observed with RNA deletions. Location of amino acid substitutions in the three-dimensional structures of nsp12 (polymerase) and S suggest significant structural or functional effects. Thus, patients who develop mild symptoms may be a richer source of genetic variants of SARS-CoV-2 than patients with moderate or severe COVID-19.Peer reviewe

SARS-CoV-2 Point Mutation and Deletion Spectra, and Their Association with Different Disease Outcome

Mutant spectra of RNA viruses are important to understand viral pathogenesis, and response to selective pressures. There is a need to characterize the complexity of mutant spectra in coronaviruses sampled from infected patients. In particular, the possible relationship between SARS-CoV-2 mutant spectrum complexity and disease associations has not been established. In the present study, we report an ultra-deep sequencing (UDS) analysis of the mutant spectrum of amplicons from the nsp12 (polymerase)- and spike (S)-coding regions of thirty nasopharyngeal isolates (diagnostic samples) of SARS-CoV-2 of the first COVID-19 pandemic wave (Madrid, Spain, April 2020) classified according to the severity of ensuing COVID-19. Low frequency mutations and deletions, counted relative to the consensus sequence of the corresponding isolate, were overwhelmingly abundant. We show that the average number of different point mutations, mutations per haplotype and several diversity indices was significantly higher in SARS-CoV-2 isolated from patients who developed mild disease than in those associated with moderate or severe disease (exitus). No such bias was observed with RNA deletions. Location of amino acid substitutions in the three dimensional structures of nsp12 (polymerase) and S suggest significant structural or functional effects. Thus, patients who develop mild symptoms may be a richer source of genetic variants of SARS-CoV-2 than patients with moderate or severe COVID-19.This work was supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (COVID-19 Research Call COV20/00181), and co‐financed by European Development Regional Fund ‘A way to achieve Europe’. The work was also supported by grants CSIC-COV19-014 from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), project 525/C/2021 from Fundació La Marató de TV3, PID2020-113888RB-I00 from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, BFU2017-91384-EXP from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MCIU), PI18/00210 and PI21/00139 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III and S2018/BAA-4370 (PLATESA2 from Comunidad de Madrid/FEDER). C.P., M.C. and P.M. are supported by the Miguel Servet programme of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (CPII19/00001, CPII17/00006 and CP16/00116, respectively) cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). CIBERehd (Centro de Investigación en Red de Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivas) is funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Institutional grants from the Fundación Ramón Areces and Banco Santander to the CBMSO are also acknowledged. The team at CBMSO belongs to the Global Virus Network (GVN). B.M.-G. is supported by predoctoral contract PFIS FI19/00119 from Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo) cofinanced by Fondo Social Europeo (FSE). R.L.- V. is supported by predoctoral contract PEJD-2019-PRE/BMD-16414 from Comunidad de Madrid. C.G.-C. is supported by predoctoral contract PRE2018-083422 from MCIU. BS was supported by a predoctoral research fellowship (Doctorados Industriales, DI-17- 09134) from Spanish MINECON