Discourse Markers and Modal Expressions in Speakers with and without Asperger Syndrome: A Pragmatic-Perceptive Approach

From a theoretical point of view, this paper offers a new framework for the analysis of discourse markers: a pragmatic-perceptive model that emphasizes the point of the communication process in which such particles become more relevant. Furthermore, this approach tries to give an account of the modal expressions (attenuators and intensifiers) that speakers use in oral speech. The quotients of absolute and relative frequency with regard to the use of textual, interactive and enunciative markers - focused on the message, the addressee and the addresser respectively - are compared in two samples of 20 subjects with typical development and other 20 with Asperger syndrome. The general results of this research suggest that these latter speakers display a suitable command of textual markers, whereas they overexploit the enunciative ones in conversation

Does it pay to be socially responsible? Evidence from Spanish retail banking sector

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of strategic competition in retail banking when some of the financial firms are non-profit organisations that invest in social activities. Banking literature about competition is fairly large, but the strategic interaction between profit maximizing and non profit maximizers has not been extensively analysed except for Purroy and Salas (1999). In this paper, a completely different approach is taken. An adaptation of Hotelling’s two stage model of spatial competition is developed to take into account consumer perceptions respect to the two different types of financial institutions. The empirical analysis confirms that consumers take into account other features different from the price, such as social contribution or closer service to make a deposit or mortgage decision. These conclusions are of interest in the debate about a firm’s social or ethical activities. It is shown that if consumers value social activities, firms can improve their results by behaving socially responsible.Strategic competition; Hotelling´s model; Spanish banking; Corporate social responsibility

El español atlántico: revitalización de un concepto metodológico desde la dialectología

This study examines the main theoretical contributions that have emerged from the dialectological field around the concept of Atlantic Spanish. First, the validity of a traditional discipline, such as dialectology, is discussed in the frame of modern linguistics and in relation to other complementary disciplines, for example, sociolinguistics and geolinguistics. The central section of the article aims to cover the genesis of the principle of Atlantic Spanish, considers its persistence across time and tries to characterize the Spanish dialectal system. Finally, the paper includes the most significant conclusions arising from this theoretical review

Fraseología de "ojo" en diccionarios monolingües del español actual.

This study aims to explore the phraseological units which contain the substantive «eye» in Spanish. Adopting the main features of phraseologisms as a theoretical framework, we present the results of thirty-eight expressions found in four monolingual peninsular Spanish dictionaries (DRAE, DSal, DCLAVE, DVOX). We compare these results with data from a Mexican Spanish vocabulary (DEUM). Finally, the effect of geographical differences on the phraseological distribution of Spanish is also discussed

Disponibilidad léxica sobre palabras específicas en estudiantes de Educación Secundaria de Almería

Resumen basado en el de la publicaciónTítulo, resumen y palabras clave también en inglésSiguiendo la tradición previa de investigación sobre didáctica de la lengua y disponibilidad léxica, se presentan los resultados de la aplicación de una prueba asociativa a una muestra de cuatrocientos estudiantes de Educación Secundaria, durante el curso académico 1998-1999, en la ciudad de Almería (España). El objetivo del trabajo consistió en determinar los usos específicos de palabras basadas en dieciocho centros de interés. Es decir, se examinaron palabras de registro coloquial, extranjerismos, formas dialecto-patrimoniales, marcas, siglas y abreviaturas. Finalmente, se proporciona un análisis de estos grupos léxico-semánticos, desde una perspectiva descriptiva, que permite conocer mejor el vocabulario específico con el que cuentan los discentes en este nivel de enseñanza.ES

3D human pose estimation from depth maps using a deep combination of poses

Many real-world applications require the estimation of human body joints for higher-level tasks as, for example, human behaviour understanding. In recent years, depth sensors have become a popular approach to obtain three-dimensional information. The depth maps generated by these sensors provide information that can be employed to disambiguate the poses observed in two-dimensional images. This work addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation from depth maps employing a Deep Learning approach. We propose a model, named Deep Depth Pose (DDP), which receives a depth map containing a person and a set of predefined 3D prototype poses and returns the 3D position of the body joints of the person. In particular, DDP is defined as a ConvNet that computes the specific weights needed to linearly combine the prototypes for the given input. We have thoroughly evaluated DDP on the challenging 'ITOP' and 'UBC3V' datasets, which respectively depict realistic and synthetic samples, defining a new state-of-the-art on them.Comment: Accepted for publication at "Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation