Studies in Linguistics and Cognition

li158

Linguistic Insights

Studies in Language and Communication

Bárbara Eizaga Rebollar (ed.)

Peter Lang

Studies in Linguistics and Cognition

Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliograﬁe; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Studies in linguistics and cognition / Bárbara Eizaga Rebollar (ed.). p. cm. – (Linguistic insights: studies in language and communication; v. 158) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-0343-1138-0 1. Linguistics. 2. Cognition. 3. Semantics. I. Eizaga Rebollar, Bárbara P121.S8145 2012 410–dc23 2012000885

ISSN 1424-8689 ISBN 978-3-0343-1138-0US-ISBN 0-8204-8382-6 © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2012 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microﬁlming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Switzerland

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements .............................................................................. 7 BÁRBARA EIZAGA REBOLLAR, JOSÉ MARÍA GARCÍA NÚÑEZ, MARÍA ÁNGELES ZARCO TEJADA Preface .................................................................................................. 9

Section 1: The Lexicon and Cognition MARÍA TADEA DÍAZ HORMIGO AND CARMEN VARO VARO Neology and Cognition ....................................................................... 15 GÉRARD FERNÁNDEZ SMITH, MARTA SÁNCHEZ-SAUS LASERNA AND LUIS ESCORIZA MORERA Studies on Lexical Availability: The Current Situation and Some Future Prospects ................................................................. 35 MARÍA LUISA MORA MILLÁN Adverbs in the Internet Lexicon: New Modes of Signification .......... 57 MARÍA ÁNGELES ZARCO TEJADA ‘Holding’ Metaphorical Meaning from a Computational Linguistics Approach: The Verb Hold and its Counterparts in Spanish ............... 81

Section 2: Semantics and Cognition JOSÉ MARÍA GARCÍA NÚÑEZ Attitude Verbs and Nominalization .................................................. 107 CARMEN NOYA GALLARDO Cleft Sentences: Semantic Properties and Communicative Meanings ........................ 133 FRANCISCO J. RUIZ DE MENDOZA IBÁÑEZ AND ALICIA GALERA MASEGOSA Metaphoric and Metonymic Complexes in Phrasal Verb Interpretation: Metaphoric Chains .......................... 153

Section 3: Communication and Cognition BÁRBARA EIZAGA REBOLLAR Meaning Adjustment Processes in Idiom Variants ........................... 185 JOSÉ LUIS GUIJARRO MORALES Beauty and Art in Science ................................................................ 213 ANA ISABEL RODRÍGUEZ-PIÑERO ALCALÁ AND MARÍA GARCÍA ANTUÑA Specialised Communication and Language Teaching for Specific Purposes ........................................................................ 245 FRANCISCO YUS RAMOS Strategies and Effects in Humorous Discourse: The Case of Jokes ...... 271 Notes on Contributors ....................................................................... 297

GÉRARD FERNÁNDEZ SMITH1 / MARTA SÁNCHEZ-SAUS LASERNA2 / LUIS ESCORIZA MORERA3

Studies on Lexical Availability: the Current Situation and Some Future Prospects

1. Introduction In linguistics, the statistical study of lexicon is a field of investigation that has a long history. Since the appearance in 1949 of the information theory by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, numerous advances have been made in the field of lexicon-statistics. Consequently, in many linguistic disciplines the concept of lexical frequency has become particularly important, making reference to the greater or lesser regularity in which a lexical unit appears within a set of texts. Some years earlier, George K. Zipf had formulated the famous Zipf’s Law, which was used to calculate the ranks of linguistic units and the frequency with which they appear in a text. This law states that the rank of a linguistic unit is inversely proportional to its frequency of use, meaning that those units that are positioned high up in the list of ranks (i.e. those with a lower rank) are the most frequently used, which happen to be grammatical words, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, etc. As opposed to frequency, which is a calculation that does not depend on the nature and purpose of the text in which the words exist, the concept of lexical availability is generally based on the distinction between thematic words and non-thematic words. According to this distinction, lexical frequency would be made up of those words that 1 2 3

. . .

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G. Fernández Smith / M. Sánchez-Saus Laserna / L. Escoriza Morera

appear in any type of text regardless of the subject, which includes non-thematic words, whereas lexical availability would be formed by the lexical elements that the speakers have in their mental lexicon and whose use is determined by the specific theme of the text, which are known as thematic words. The combination of both makes up the basic (or fundamental) lexicon of a language. However, from this emerges a theoretical problem that we will only mention here. The specific themes that we have referred to are made up of the so-called areas of interest that are used in order to obtain the linguistic data that is the subject of this study. Consequently, the area of interest is the key factor when it comes to maintaining this theoretical focus for the study of a language’s lexicon, given that this type of contextualisation acts as a focus or attractor in the processing of the lexicon that is realised verbally as a result of such a stimulus. Consequently, we should ask ourselves which areas should be used, or which are likely to provide a more exact repertoire, given that the limits of the repertoire of a given community’s available lexicon will by definition depend on the areas of interest that are used for its obtaining. Therefore, in order to obtain the available lexicon of a certain community, an associative test is used. As well as a sociolinguistic questionnaire4, the test is drawn up around a series of areas of interest or thematic areas that act as stimuli so that the available lexicon is made clear, in accordance with our previous definition. For each of the areas of interest used in the research, the individuals being tested must provide in writing all those lexical elements that they associate with each centre. It is therefore a type of survey based on open lists. A series of guidelines have been established for this test, within the framework of the Pan-Hispanic Project of Available Lexicon, guaran4

Given that it deals with sociolinguistic research, the questionnaire aims to allow the stratification of the sample that is used. In general, the participants are requested to provide personal data (anonymously of course) relating to the social and linguistic variables that are going to be taken into account in the investigation, such as sex, age, place of birth, other places where they have resided, mother tongue, etc. Furthermore, they must complete a series of sections, the information of which is used for the post-stratification, based on the socio-cultural level (SCL) depending on such factors as profession, education or income.

Studies on Lexical Availability

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teeing methodological homogeneity and rigour. However, the conditions may obviously vary in other investigations that do not belong to this large-scale project. In accordance with these guidelines, the participants have a maximum reaction time of two minutes for each area of interest. The areas must be completed consecutively, without returning back to a previous area or filling out the next area before the two minutes of the current one have passed. In this respect, the order of appearance of the lexical elements and their link with a certain area of interest are of huge importance, as data obtained from participants that have simultaneously filled out two or more areas of interest, alternating their notes between sections, would not be reliable. This is because such data would invalidate the cognitive process of semantic association upon which the entire theory behind this field of investigation is based. For the same reason, it is equally important that the questionnaire is carried out in complete silence when taking place in a classroom, in order to prevent participants from making comments that could influence others to respond differently from how they would have done originally. Although this matter, given its ethnomethodological approach, could initially be seen as a clear reflection of the relationships that are established between languages and cultures, it also presents a psychological aspect insomuch as the encyclopaedic knowledge (in the pragmatic sense of the word) that each participant uses when completing the questionnaire is related to their perception of the world and their environment. Furthermore, the researcher, paradoxically, presupposes various hypotheses when deciding which stimuli will, in his opinion, contribute more to the description of the studied community’s available lexicon. As a result, even though an initial set exists made up of sixteen areas of interest (those which are used constantly, for example, in the pan-Hispanic project), many authors have discussed other areas of interest in their research that, for different reasons, could be of particular use (cf. Fernández Smith et al. 2008: 30). The sixteen areas of interest proposed by Gougenheim et al. (1964) are:

38 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16)


Parts of the body Clothing Parts of the house (not including furniture) Furniture in the home Food and drink Objects on the dining table The kitchen and its utensils School: furniture and materials Lighting, heating and methods of airing an area The city The countryside Methods of transport Jobs in the countryside and garden Animals Games and entertainment Professions and trades

What is certain is that, even since the beginning, noticeable approximations exist in the studies on lexical availability (as regards social psychology), which enrich the different facets that they are composed of. In this respect one can highlight, for example, the introduction at the end of the 1980s of the coherence rate, thought up by Max S. Echeverría. This rate measures the agreement level in the participants’ responses for the same area of interest, which as a result leads to the grading of the areas from the most compact to the most spread out semantically; this can easily be linked to the concept of category in the framework of cognitive linguistics. In this respect, López Morales (1999: 25-26) provides some considerations concerning the importance that the data obtained from the studies on lexical availability could have for psycholinguistics. Thus, for example, Echeverría (2001) himself has developed a piece of educational software, Vocabulario disponible (Available vocabulary), which aims to evaluate and develop the available lexicon of the students in the teaching of Spanish as a mother tongue. The program is made up of three units (introduction, diagnosis and tasks) thus allowing the pupil to diagnose their own rates of avail-


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ability5 for each area of interest and to complete exercises with the vocabulary that has been extracted from the questionnaires carried out in Chile. The program is based on metacognitive theories, according to which a valid learning strategy is that in which the student is fully conscious of the learning process, of what, how, and how much they are learning. The type of tasks that it includes, such as associating images with definitions, pairing up words with their definitions, proposing terms that cover a list of semantic features, etc., clearly reflect its psycholinguistic focus. In an interesting development of the cognitive assumptions that support the processing and recovery of the mental lexicon, Hernández Muñoz et al. (2006) applied the psycholinguistic methodology to the description of availability, with which they aimed to identify predictive categories of rates of availability through statistical analyses (cf. also Hernández Muñoz 2006).

2. Current situation of studies on lexical availability 2.1

Past studies on lexical availability worldwide

When exploring, even succinctly, the status of the matter in relation to the studies on lexical availability, it is always advisable to point out some of the milestones that have marked its development in the recent history of linguistics. In this respect, research in this field began in the 1950s when a team of French specialists (Gougenheim et al. 1964) dedicated themselves to the task of selecting the vocabulary that was representative of the French language while at the same time useful for those using it, as an integral part of the large body of work entitled Le Français Élémentaire. The project arose from a UNESCO initiative, which aimed to encourage the teaching of the French language (or help maintain it) in the territories of the French Union that although independent, were still linked to the French culture and lan5

The so-called índice de disponibilidad léxica individual [rate of individual lexical availability].

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guage. Although Michéa (1953) had already put forward the idea of countering an available lexicon with the frequent lexicon, what is certain is that the initial criterion followed by this team was based on lexical frequency, assuming that the most frequent words must be the most useful, and possibly the most used (López Morales 1999: 10). However, in their first lexical-statistical investigations on the frequency of appearance of the lexical units, the authors established that the most frequent terms were grammatical words (prepositions, conjunctions, determiners etc.)6 and not nouns, whose frequency was very low or non-existent, as well as that many frequent words were not common in French (and vice versa). They concluded that the frequency of use of the words depended on the themes of the texts and conversations, and not on the number of words analysed, meaning that in reality, some of the most common words are only realised in the speaker’s mind by means of a thematic stimulus, or in other words if the subject of the discussion requires it. From this the differences that have been referred to between frequent lexicon and available lexicon are established. Research like that of Mackey (1971) in Canada, and that of his significant group of followers such as Dimitrijevic (1969) in Scotland, or López Morales (1973) in Puerto Rico, included important contributions to the theoretical and methodological systematisation of this new line of research7. It was actually the teaching of Humberto López Morales which led to the setting up in the 1990s of the Pan-Hispanic Project of Available Lexicon, which we refer to next.

6 7

Due to Zipf’s Law. Some issues, such as the statistical treatment of the data, were not resolved until some years later. The first formulas for the calculation of lexical availability presented problems relating to the number of individuals taking part in the survey and, above all, relating to the fact that the order in which the words appeared was not taken into account. Finally, in 1983, Lorán and López Morales, in their Nouveau calcul de l’indice de disponibilité, developed the first formula that considered where words appeared. This formula was then improved by López Chávez and Strassburger Frías (1987; 1991) with the introduction of a new coefficient, the number e. This allows the frequency and the order of appearance to be combined without distortion, regardless of how many people are participating, or whether the lists produced are of unequal length, and of course regardless of the frequency of appearance of each word.


2.2.

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The Pan-Hispanic Project as a benchmark for studies on lexical availability in Spanish

The Pan-Hispanic Project of Available Lexicon has become an important benchmark for studies on lexical availability. Its distinction lies in the effort made by its developers to ensure a homogeneous methodology for all the investigations that make up the project. Thus, even when researchers with very different origins and training took part in the project, the resulting works used (with very few variations) the same methodological proposals: the type of questionnaire used to compile the materials, the areas of interest taken into consideration, the criteria for editing the data8 and the statistical treatment of the data. Likewise, recommendations exist concerning the minimum number of survey participants required to ensure that each case is represented, but above all, clear criteria also exist for the selection of all the sociolinguistic variables that the research must include: sex, socio-cultural level (complex variable that comes from indicators such as the parents’ level of education, their profession and the family’s income), geographic area (depending on whether the school is in a rural or city area), type of school (state-run or public), as well as other specific variables that can be included in the investigation, such as mother tongue, language used in the family, the teaching model, etc. To sum up, the Pan-Hispanic Project aims to discover the lexical rules of Spanish from the available lexicon of preuniversity students, i.e. those that have not yet started to specialise on a certain subject and that are in their last year of secondary education, in order to create a pan-Hispanic dictionary of lexical availability, formed by the different partial dictionaries of each area that is studied. In the majority of Spain’s autonomous communities (in reality, in Spain the boundaries are set by province) the repertoires of available lexicon are, in many cases, in phases of conclusion or are very advanced, and a project under way is entitled Available Lexicon of 8

This is a difficult matter at the centre of the Pan-Hispanic Project’s investigations, as could have been the case for the selection of the areas of interest if it had not been stipulated beforehand. In general, the criteria proposed by Samper Padilla (1998) have been followed, although with several clarifications of certain points in each individual case.

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Spain, which currently has more than 3,000 participants. Pioneering research must be highlighted, such as that by María José Azurmendi, San Sebastián 1983; Maitena Etxebarría, Bilbao 1996; María Victoria Mateo García, Almeria 1998; Alberto Carcedo González, Asturias 2001; Adolfo González Martínez, Cadiz 2002; José Antonio Samper Padilla and Clara Hernández, Gran Canaria; José Ramón Gómez Molina and María Begoña Gómez Devís, Valencia 2004; José Antonio Bartol Hernández, Soria 2004; etc. As regards the area of Latin America, there are also numerous pieces of research that have either been completed or are currently being carried out, such as the studies by Humberto López Morales, Puerto Rico 1973; Orlando Alba, Dominican Republic 1995; Max S. Echeverría, in Chile, as well as many others in Honduras, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, etc. (cf. Samper Padilla 2006 for an overall presentation of the current situation). There is no doubt that one of the most important contributions which have helped the progress of this project has been the appearance of Dispolex9 in 2000. This computer tool for the treatment of data and the calculation of rates of availability is the result of a project carried out at the University of Salamanca and coordinated by José Antonio Bartol Hernández and Natividad Hernández Muñoz. This tool has greatly improved the possibilities of its predecessor Lexidisp. The website fulfils other purposes of interest to specialists by: providing an efficient means of communication between experts on lexical availability; providing those interested with an updated bibliography; acting as an instrument for publicising current research projects; and providing a forum for debate on everything concerning this area of research. Furthermore, Dispolex accepts all types of research into lexical availability, and not just that included in the pan-Hispanic project. Finally, it is worth mentioning that three conventions have taken place over recent years for the researchers of the project, one of which took place in Bilbao and the other two in San Millán de la Cogolla. These meetings provided those present with the opportunity to share their progress, as well as to make contact with other researchers with common interests, and even to make decisions for the efficient running of the project. 9

Cf. .


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In reality, one could say that the objective of any piece of research in this field, which, as is well known, is the composition of the lexical repertoire of a certain community, is not an end in itself. This is because both the repertoires and the different methodological aspects used by the researcher can be modified or applied to specific problems of the linguistic description. In this sense, the research by Hernández Muñoz (2006) seems paradigmatic, as she demonstrates her desire to contribute to “the achieving of the integrated theory of availability in all its scientific dimensions” (Hernández Muñoz 2006: 18). We will now look more closely at issues relating to lexical availability in relation to two of the most growing prospects at present, within the framework of studies on lexical availability, that is, the contact of languages, and the Teaching of a Foreign Language (TFL).

3. Lexical availability and language contact 3.1.

The available lexicon as a rate of interferences

In a world like that in which we live, composed of some two hundred nations in which several thousand different linguistic systems co-exist, contact between these systems is clearly unavoidable. Although research into the linguistic phenomena arising from the aforementioned fact has interested authors for many centuries who have devoted themselves to studying language, research into linguistic contact notably increased during the second half of the 20th century, in accordance with the boom in several disciplines coming under the so called external language such as sociolinguistics, with which it has a direct link. One of the most representative authors of studies on linguistic contact during this period was Weinreich (1952), who was perhaps the one who most developed the concept of interference10, which was under10

It is necessary to mention that due to the negative connotations that this term may cause, and due to its complicated interrelation with the concept of convergence, from which it is separated by the supposed grammaticality of the re-

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stood to be the appearance of “deviation as regards the rules of either of the two languages spoken by bilingual individuals, as a result of familiarity with more than one language” (Moreno Fernández 1998: 260). This concept, which only represents one of the many possible phenomena arising from contact with languages, can in our opinion be clearly related to studies on lexical availability. This is because, considering that the interferences between linguistic systems can become apparent at phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical levels, the analysis of the vocabulary of those bilingual areas can provide us with valid information for at least three of the four aforementioned levels of linguistic analysis, not including the syntactic level. The studies on lexical availability carried out up until now in the Spanish world have not spent much time analysing the influence of other languages on the use of Spanish in those areas of the Spanishspeaking world where this can be analysed. Some interesting pieces of research should be highlighted, such as that by Llopis Rodrigo (2005) or Serrano Zapata (2006), which concern Catalan and Spanish. Several authors have observed the existence of numerous anglicisms in the use of Spanish (cf., for example, López Morales 1999), resulting from the general cultural influence of the English language and not from any particular contact between the two languages. The evident possibilities for a coordinated study between lexical availability and linguistic contact that these pieces of work reflect, and the lack of publications on the topic, justify the interest of the research that has been carried out in Gibraltar. The available lexicon of the Gibraltarians, as we will demonstrate later, does not only include a high number of common anglicisms present in almost all the investigations carried out in Spanish communities, but it also shows a raised percentage of interference of the English language in the use of Spanish vocabulary that is completely specific and not evident in the studies on available lexicon carried out up until now.

sults of the contact, some authors, since Clyne (1967), have preferred on occasions to speak of transference when referring to the described phenomenon.


3.2.

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Influences from language contact on the tests of available lexicon: the example of the community of Gibraltar

Its multicultural character is one of the characteristics that best define the community of Gibraltar. According to data from the government of the Rock11, in 2006 the total population was 28,875 inhabitants12, of whom 23,447 were Gibraltarians, 3,284 were British and 2,144 belonged to other nationalities. Changes in the population in recent years reflect a gradual decrease in the number of British citizens, who in the 1970s numbered double the current figure. The figures mentioned could lead one to think that the number of Spaniards present in Gibraltar is smaller than it is in reality. However, if we examine the data provided by the Employment Survey Report of October 2006, we can see that the number of Spanish workers exceeds 1,626 people, since a large amount of the population do not consider themselves residents, and instead just work in Gibraltar while living in one of the neighbouring Spanish towns, which is why they do not appear in the census information. From a linguistic point of view, the diversity of nationalities and beliefs can be seen in the co-existence of different linguistic systems in the community of Gibraltar. The importance of English and Spanish is, for many reasons, overwhelming in comparison with other languages. The relationship between English and Spanish in Gibraltar could refer to a situation of a diglossic nature, since English has a prestige that Spanish does not possess (for obvious reasons such as the British nationality of the Rock, the language policy of the local government, the fact that it is the language used by the soldiers that live on the Rock, work-related differences between the speakers of the different languages, or the international prestige of the English language) and is used for formal communications thanks, in large, to the

11

12

This, and other information of a demographic nature concerning Gibraltar, is extracted from different documents drawn up by the Government of Gibraltar’s Office of Statistics. We specifically examined the 2001 Census of Gibraltar, as well as the Employment Survey Report and the Abstract of Statistics, both from 2006. It is important to take into account that this general figure does not include visitors, tourists, or British servicemen present on the Rock.

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aforementioned language planning13. Furthermore, this difference of prestige in the use of the two main languages in Gibraltar contrasts and coexists with another phenomenon arising from the linguistic contact between English and Spanish: code switching, which is a sign of mixed identity (cf. Poplack/Sankoff 1988). We have carried out surveys on lexical availability in English and Spanish in different research projects with the community of Gibraltar. 137 students in their final year of secondary school where questioned in English and 129 students of the same year were questioned in Spanish, meaning that a high percentage of all the possible participants took part. Following the usual framework developed in the Spanish world and described beforehand, the survey was made up of two parts. The first part was for personal information that was later used for a sociolinguistic analysis, which included information referring to gender, place of birth, time spent outside of Gibraltar, mother tongue and other languages spoken, as well as the participant’s parents’ place of birth, occupation, income and educational level. In the second part, different verbal stimuli or areas of interest were proposed so that the participant could contribute those lexical elements that came to their mind during a period of two minutes. Responses were allocated to twenty-one areas of interest, since another five were added to the original sixteen used in the studies making up the Pan-Hispanic Project: colours; the sea; physical and moral defects and qualities; actions, and religion, some of them with the intention of obtaining adjectives and verbs to complement the large amount of nouns that appear in this type of test, and others as a result of the socio-cultural situation of the community being studied. When first looking at the available Spanish lexicon of the participants of Gibraltar we found common anglicisms in the Spanish world and many lexical elements that, in our opinion, reflect a clear interference of English in the use of Spanish, which is perfectly justifiable due 13

Lipski (1986: 424) states that ‘the use of English in Gibraltar is essential in the following situations: (1) when addressing an unknown civil servant, or any civil servant in a public or official setting; (2) on addressing an assistant or receptionist in a government office when the person speaking wishes to maintain a certain level of personal dignity; (3) when addressing a foreigner or tourist who does not appear to be from Spain; (4) generally, in any situation that leads to the maintenance [sic] or improvement of the prestige and social level of the person speaking.’


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to the contact of both languages in Gibraltar. In this second block we saw cases in which it appears that structural aspects of English are reproduced when forming words in Spanish, including what some authors (cf. Gómez Capuz 1998: 67-68) call an asymmetrical rough calque like air condicionado (English air conditioning) or micro horno (English microwave), and others in which the interference appears to be caused by phonic or graphic reasons14. The study of these cases, which from our point of view are more interesting, clearly comes under the category of linguistic contact. More specifically, we can distinguish: 1) Loan words (231), amongst which we can find: 1.1) commercial brands (30), included under the areas of interest of Clothing, Food and drink and Games and entertainment and common to the investigations carried out in Spanish on available lexicon; 1.2) common loan words (52) found in other investigations on the Spanish language and that do not seem to be particularly specific to the community of Gibraltar, such as tennis, ketchup, whisky, pub, camping, jeep, taxi, hamster, hockey, puzzle, manager, topless or surf, and 1.3) specific loan words (149) that are not present in other investigations on the available lexicon in the Spanish language and that are unique to the community of Gibraltar, proving the English influence on spoken Spanish in a bilingual context, such as brain, ears, heart, dress, shoes, oven, lamp, spoon, freezer, blackboard, restaurant, animals, train, mouse, tiger, chess, dentist, judge, police or sailor. 2) Hybrid loan words (144) in which partial morphemic substitution and inclusion is produced, with lexical elements that confuse between graphic or morphemic elements of English and Spanish. We can find several cases such as: 14

Taking into account that we work with a written reference corpus based on surveys, we do not have data of a phonic nature, although the spellings that have been discovered help us to differentiate between cases in which there could be a difference in the pronunciation and those in which it is unlikely. What is clear is the convenience of contrasting the data obtained from this study with those of an oral nature in order to help complete the study into interference.

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2.1) aphesis or loss of the first vowel before the letter s (spina, studio, spatula, scientifico, statua; 2.2) confusion of vowels (systema, fraydora, bicycleta, edeficions, caravanes, hymnos, synagoga); 2.3) confusion in the use of diphthongs or geminated vowels (blousa, sweter, fraydora, trein, maintener, greis, touristas, puree, footbol); 2.4) gemination (attico, caffe, professores, collegios, traffico, pollucion, hippopotamo, commerciante, attractiva, buddismo, obsession, communiones); 2.5) confusion of consonants (trackea, pygamas, gardin, geographico, machina, phosphoros, cathedral, parkes, tanke, elephante, executiva, governador), and 2.6) morphemic substitutions and confusions (computadora < computer, carpeta < carpet, refrigeratorio < refrigerator, cartucheras < cartridges, unsociable, untipatico). 3) Syntactic calques (14), such as cuarto de huésped < guest room, cuarto de utilidad < utility room, pista negra < blackboard, coche de cable < cable-car, cirujano de árboles < tree surgeon, cruce de cebra < zebra crossing. 4) Semantic calques (7), such as crecer vacas < grow or crecer granos < grow, plato refrito < heated plates, refresco de fruta < fruit juice.

4. Lexical availability and the teaching of foreign languages

4.1. Use of lexical availability for selecting the vocabulary in the teaching of foreign languages Despite the growth experienced in recent years by studies on lexical availability, few investigations have taken advantage of the methods offered by such studies to analyse the lexicon and have applied these


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methods to the teaching and learning of foreign languages, even though this field is becoming ever more important15. Since these studies began, there has been concern over the application of the availability results into the field of teaching, both for mother tongues and foreign languages. For mother tongues, the drawing up of a basic lexicon is considered to be very useful in order to teach the language in the most systematic and effective manner, mainly referring to the planning and acquisition of vocabulary. Knowing which words are the most used in a language is a very good base for the preparation of textbooks that include them. As regards the field of teaching foreign languages, Gougenheim and his colleagues researched the lexical availability of French speakers with the aim of providing students learning French with a solid first phase in the acquisition of the language. Therefore, the studies on lexical availability contribute the keys for improving the selection of vocabulary in textbooks. It has been shown that this selection is not usually the most appropriate, since it differs excessively from the available lexicon arising from various studies (cf. Benítez/Zebrowski 1993). This is why it is interesting to apply lexical availability to the teaching of a language to foreigners since, as is stated by Carcedo (2000: 46), these tests applied on foreign speakers not only show us the effect of certain social and cultural factors on the examined speakers’ lists of availability, but also, and here is the most important part, they allow us to analyse the vocabulary known by foreign students, to detect the possible differences between the speakers of different mother tongues, to observe the learning phases, to compare their available lexicon with that of other communities of native speakers, and to provide the editor of teaching manuals and books with teaching material that is suitable for each of the different levels of teaching.

15

Although rare, there are some published works on the available lexicon of students of Spanish. Carcedo (2000) researched secondary school students from Finland and Samper Hernández (2002) studied a group of foreign students of different nationalities at the University of Salamanca.

50 4.2.


Editing the data: problems belonging to research in Spanish with non-native participants

In general, the editing criteria used in studies on lexical availability concerning foreign speakers of Spanish are the same as those published by Samper Padilla (1998), upon which the Pan-Hispanic Project is based. However, working with foreign participants means that the editing of the data comes up against different problems to those found in pieces of research carried out with natives. As we have already mentioned, few studies have been dedicated to this subject, so in this section we focus on two of the problems belonging to research using non-native participants: firstly, mistakes (both spelling and grammatical) are much more numerous, meaning that certain limits are established when accepting the words that are written; secondly, the presence of loan words, foreignisms and calques (formal as well as semantic) is also much greater16. Perhaps the greatest problem facing the researcher when studying the lexical availability of foreign students of Spanish is that of deciding what margin of error, with respect to the correct Spanish word, is allowed. It is clear that not all the words with formal mistakes can be rejected, since even in studies with native speakers it would not make sense to act in such a strict way, nor to permit only spelling mistakes that could be considered normal for the Spanish orthography (confusion between b and v, j and g, and ll and y, problems with the letter h, etc.). It is necessary to be more flexible, although the limit has to be set at some point, since not knowing the significance of a word may mean that the word itself is not known. It is certainly not with the mistakes relating to the choice of gender where we should be inflexible, as this is one of the main difficulties of Spanish for many students. Nor should we be uncompromising with spelling mistakes where Spanish phonemes are written with spellings that in other languages represent similar phonemes, such as photo, exercicios or conhelador, or in the confusion of spellings that in Spanish differentiate 16

Samper Hernández (2001) makes a good summary of the problems affecting research on lexical availability with foreign participants. The matter of evaluating mistakes is not covered, but that of loan words and calques is, along with other matters that are more easily solved.


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phonemes that in other languages are not differentiated, for example camarrero, carerra, bariga. Although this subject has not been studied to a great extent, we believe that the limit is in derivational morphology. There are many cases in which the root of the word is correct, but the derivational morpheme is not, since an allomorph has been chosen (psicologista instead of psicólogo, cajador instead of cajero, cocinador instead of cocinero), or a non-existent morpheme has been created: granjenador instead of granjero. Even when one can easily deduce the correct Spanish word, we believe that these mistakes seriously affect the structure of the words and should therefore not be accepted. The presence of loan words recorded amongst the lexical units in the surveys on foreign students’ lexical availability is, as one may expect, numerous. Here we are referring only to the manner in which their processing should be carried out, ie. which should be accepted and which should not, depending on whether they are accepted by dictionaries and how extensive their use is in the Spanish language. Those that are accepted by the Real Academia Española (RAE) and that are consequently present in dictionaries, both foreignisms (autostop, camping, surf, hobby, hall, scooter, gin, jogging, baguette) and loan words that have been adapted to Spanish phonetically and as regards spelling (capuchino, bistec, güisqui, voleibol, bacón), do not present any problem. The dictionary of current Spanish, called the Diccionario del español actual, is more flexible and accepts other loan words such as jeans, scout, shopping, squash, T-shirt and tsunami. A second type of loan words are formed by those foreignisms that, despite not appearing in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española or in other dictionaries, are widely used in Spanish, meaning that their inclusion in the lists of availability is recommended. Since the RAE does not accept them, their original form is not altered: leggin, mozzarella, tortellini, muesli, sherry, kitesurf, roller, snowboard. Finally, those foreign words that are neither accepted nor widely used in Spanish should be removed. This normally concerns words from the participants’ mother tongues or languages that they know, above all English. All those words that are detected as calques (whether semantic or formal) and that are not lexicalised in Spanish must be withdrawn.

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The majority of interferences are usually formal, in which an ending that the students believe to be Spanish is added to the root of a foreign word: cravata, journalista, depensar, investor, spender, eveillarse, lampa, carta de identidad, carta de crédito, serioso, zona pedestrional, sala de baño. Others are however semantic, although these occur less often: argumento instead of discusión, complemento instead of piropo, and carpeta instead of alfombra, originating from the English words argument, compliment and carpet respectively. 4.3.

Some results: lexical availability in students of TFL at the University of Cadiz

During the academic year 2007-2008 we carried out a study of lexical availability on the foreign students that were studying Spanish at the School of Modern Languages at the University of Cadiz. 81 students took part with different mother tongues: English, French, German, Italian, as well as some Slavic languages (Polish, Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, Serbian) and Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian), who found themselves spread between the six levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2 according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages – CEFR). The chosen areas of interest represent one of the greatest differences between this investigation and the majority of those concerning lexical availability that have already been published. This is because we realised that some of the areas may not be of much interest when working with foreign participants who, by definition, are not fluent in Spanish. Consequently, the areas with which we worked were the following: 1. The human body 2. Clothing, 3. The home, 4. Food and drink, 5. The kitchen and cooking utensils, 6. School and university, 7. The city, 8. The countryside, 9. Methods of transport, 10. Animals, 11. Leisure and free time, 12. Professions and jobs, 13. Weather and climate, 14. Usual actions and activities, 15. Physical appearance and character, 16. The family, 17. Trips and holidays, 18. Money. We believe that this set of areas of interest allows us, as the main objective, to cover the majority of the lexicon that the students either know or should know, according to the recommendations of the


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CEFR17, while at the same time maintaining enough points in common with other pieces of research, in order to be able to compare the results. We completed the quantitative analysis of the results in two different ways. Firstly, we carried out the descriptive analysis of the general results concerning the number of complete words, the number of unique lexical occurrences (Spanish term, vocablos), the average words per participant, and the coherence rates for each of the areas of interest. This descriptive analysis was applied to the comparison of the average words per participant according to the variables used in the research, which are sex, level of Spanish, mother tongue, knowledge of other languages and use of Spanish, with the aim of establishing which variables have most influence on the results. This last aspect was completed with an inductive statistical study, which revealed the influence of these variables when the results obtained in the sample are applied to the population as a whole. The comparison of the average words per participant according to the chosen variables led to results that could in principle be interesting. While the variables of mother tongue and use of Spanish did not present any great differences, we found that the results differed considerably for sex, level of Spanish and knowledge of other languages. Firstly, women answered an average 1.98 words more than men, ie. 14% more. As regards the level of Spanish, the level C participants registered an average of 2.04 more words than those of level B, and 6.94 more than those from level A, which is 10.96% more in the first case and 63.03% more in the second. Between levels B and A the difference was 4.9 words, which means an increase of 44.43%. These results therefore confirmed the hypothesis that there are factors, whether sociolinguistic or more specifically related to the level and knowledge of languages that influence the quantity of words known by a foreign student of Spanish. However, this description of the results does not take into account either the disproportionate number of participants from different groups or the possible overlap that may be produced between the factors considered. In order to resolve this problem an inductive quantitative study was carried out, which revealed three very significant pieces 17

Robles Ávila (2006) and Instituto Cervantes (2006).

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of information. The first and main one is that the level of Spanish variable explains the variation of the other variables, since it is correlated with them. In other words, the participants that satisfy each of the variants of a variable are not homogeneously spread over the different levels of Spanish. Secondly, this leads to only the level of Spanish variable explaining the variation that is produced between the individuals. In other words, the variation that this variable demonstrates is the only important one. Finally, and despite the fact that the variation according to mother tongue as a whole is not significant, this analysis showed some results below the average for French speakers, and above the average for Italian speakers. However, these conclusions should be corroborated with a large sample of participants, which would allow us to work with numerous variants without running the risk of the study being less representative, and which would also reduce the standard deviation, ie. the possible variation of each variant’s average results.

References Carcedo González, A. 2000. Disponibilidad léxica en español como lengua extranjera: el caso finlandés (estudio del nivel preuniversitario y cotejo con tres fases de adquisición). Turku: Turun Yliopisto. Clyne, M. 1967. Transference and Triggering. The Hague: Nijhoff. Dimitrijevic, N. R. 1969. Lexical availability. Heidelberg: Julius Gross Verlag. Echeverría, M. S. 2001. “Estructura y funciones de un software de vocabulario disponible”. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada 39: 87-100. Fernández Smith, G., A. M. Rico Martín, M. J. Molina García and M. A. Jiménez Jiménez 2008. Léxico disponible de Melilla: estudio sociolingüístico y repertorios léxicos. Madrid: Arco/Libros. Gómez Capuz, J. 1998. El préstamo lingüístico. Conceptos, problemas y métodos. Cuadernos de Filología, Anejo XXIX. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia.


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Gougenheim, G., R. Michéa, P. Rivenc and A. Sauvageot 1964. L’élaboration du Français Fondamental (1er degré). Étude sur l’élaboration d’un vocabulaire et d’une grammaire de base. Paris: Didier. Hernández Muñoz, N. 2006. Hacia una teoría cognitiva integrada de la disponibilidad léxica: el léxico disponible de los estudiantes castellano-manchegos. Tesis doctoral, Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Hernández Muñoz, N., C. Izura and A. Ellis 2006. “Cognitive aspects of lexical availability”. The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 18, 5: 730-755. Instituto Cervantes 2006. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes: niveles de referencia para el español, 3 vols. Alcalá de Henares/Madrid: Instituto Cervantes/Biblioteca Nueva. Lipski, J. M. 1986. “Sobre el bilingüismo anglo-hispánico en Gibraltar”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87, 3: 414-427. Llopis Rodrigo, F. 2005. “Transferències lèxiques en una comunitat de llengües en contacte”. Lenguaje y textos 23: 59-68. López Chávez, J. and C. Strassburger Frías 1987. “Otro cálculo del índice de disponibilidad”. Presente y perspectiva de la investigación computacional en México. Actas del IV Simposio de la Asociación Mexicana de Lingüística Aplicada. México: UNAM: 1006-1014. López Chávez, J. and C. Strassburger Frías 1991: “Un modelo para el cálculo del índice de disponibilidad léxica individual”. In López Morales, H. (ed.): La enseñanza del español como lengua materna. Actas del II Seminario Internacional sobre los Aportes de la Lingüística a la Enseñanza del Español como Lengua Materna. Río Piedras: Universidad de Puerto Rico: 99-112. López Morales, H. 1973. Disponibilidad léxica de los escolares de San Juan, MS. López Morales, H. 1999. Léxico disponible de Puerto Rico. Madrid: Arco/Libros. López Morales, H. 1999. “Anglicismos en el léxico disponible de Puerto Rico”. In Ortiz López, L. A., El caribe hispánico: perspectivas lingüísticas actuales. Homenaje a Manuel Álvarez Nazario. Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana: 147-170.

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Mackey, W. C. 1971. Le vocabulaire disponible du Français, 2 vols. Paris/Bruxelles/Montréal: Didier. Michéa, R. 1953. “Mots fréquents et mots disponibles. Un aspect nouveau de la statistique du langage”. Les Langues Modernes 47: 338-344. Moreno Fernández, F. 1998. Principios de sociolingüística y sociología del lenguaje. Barcelona: Ariel. Poplack, S. and D. Sankoff 1988. “Code-switching”. In Ammon, U., N. Dittmar, and K. Mattheier (eds): Sociolinguistics 2. Berlin: De Gruyter: 1174-1180. Robles Ávila, S. (coord.) 2006. La enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera a la luz del Marco Común Europeo de Referencia. Diseño curricular de los cursos para extranjeros de la Universidad de Málaga. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga. Samper Hernández, M. 2001. “Dificultades de los estudios de disponibilidad léxica en ELE: los criterios de selección”. In Bartol, J. A., S. Crespo, C. Fernández, C. Pensado, E. Prieto and N. Sánchez (eds): Nuevas aportaciones al estudio de la lengua española. Investigaciones filológicas. Salamanca: Luso-Española Ediciones: 277-286. Samper Hernández, M. 2002. Disponibilidad léxica en alumnos de español como lengua extranjera. ASELE: Málaga. Samper Padilla, J. A. 1998. “Criterios de edición del léxico disponible: sugerencias”. Lingüística 10: 311-333. Samper Padilla, J. A. 2006. “Aportaciones recientes de los estudios de disponibilidad léxica”. LynX. Panorámica de Estudios Lingüísticos 5: 5-95. Serrano Zapata, M. 2006. “Consecuencias del contacto de lenguas en Lérida: interferencias detectadas en las encuestas de disponibilidad léxica”. In Blas Arroyo, J. L., M. Casanova Ávalos and M. Velando Casanova (coords): Discurso y sociedad: contribuciones al estudio de la lengua en contexto social. Castellón: Universidad Jaume I: 811-829. Verdú Jordá, M. 1990. “Interferencias entre la lengua inglesa y la castellana”. In Bello, P., A. Feria, and J. M. Ferrán (eds): Didáctica de las segundas lenguas. Estrategias y recursos básicos. Madrid: Santillana: 245-268. Weinreich, U. 1952. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton.

MARÍA LUISA MORA MILLÁN1

Adverbs in the Internet Lexicon: New Modes of Signification

1. Introduction The advent and development of the Internet as a communication medium has caused a veritable revolution at very different levels. The Internet has had a strong impact in the social realm, a true revolution manifest not only in the decentralisation of information, but also in the creation of new ways of relating, new virtual spaces such as the Facebook, Twenti and Hi5 social networks, etc., that have indisputably driven a new lexicon. Since the 1990s, the appearance of the new terms that configure the Internet lexicon has led to several studies and congresses dedicated to a new language called Internet-language2. This article focuses on certain adverbial neologisms in English and French that form the ADVly yours/ADVment vôtre adverbial structure, which we are denominating Web Adverbs since these adverbs either identify commercial sites (most of which use the .com extension, which in colloquial and business languages generically designates

1 2

. The origins of the Internet date back to 1969; however, we could assert that this new language began to be elaborated and take shape as a lexicon as of the creation of the WorldWideWeb (www) browser, which uses the Internet as a means of transmission. In Spain, one of the first indications of this concern in the scientific field took place in 2003 at the 1st International Conference on Internet and Language (ICIL) 2003 at Jaume I University (Castellón), the second edition of which took place in 2005.