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Una persona con afasia se define como alguien que no puede establecer una conexión entre el pensamiento y el lenguaje. Muchas personas suponen que esto los hace menos inteligentes, pero pueden leer y comprender. El grupo de lectura les permite no sentirse aislados y practicar su discurso en un lugar sin prejuicios. Este artículo se relaciona con el tema neurolingüístico de este capítulo porque la afasia es una condición en la cual las partes específicas del cerebro no funcionan, lo que causa dificultad en el habla y comprensión del habla.

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Anton Chekhov's short story "The Student," said to be the master's favorite, is today's reading selection for the Aphasia Book Club.

Aphasia Book Club, you ask? It sounds improbable. Five years ago when I first read a notice for the group, which meets weekly at the Echo Park Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, I thought it must be a misprint, even a joke. Like many others, I mistakenly assumed that difficulty in speaking or reading implied a deficit in intellectual acuity. It's not true.

Aphasia is a language problem. It's a condition, but a treatable condition. Literally meaning "without speech," aphasia, as defined succinctly by neurologist Antonio Damasio, is "a breakdown of the two-way translation that establishes a correspondence between thoughts and languages." Most often the injuries to the brain are the result of strokes or aneurysms.

"You'll never find more motivated readers than those who can no longer take reading, or the ability to discuss what they've read, for granted," says public services librarian Francie Schwarz.

Schwarz cofounded the book club in 2013 with husband Mike Biel, a speech pathologist who teaches at Cal State Northridge. Their research indicates the group may be the first aphasia book club at a public library in North America.

In Los Angeles County, 25,000 to 30,000 people suffer from aphasia, Biel says, but there is little support after they leave the hospital. "When you have a communication problem, it's hard to advocate for yourself," he says. The isolation can be devastating.

For the 10 to 12 participants who come together every week to discuss a work of literature, the Aphasia Book Club is a lifeline. The readers, who range in age from early 30s to 90, are more than a year out from their initial injury, what's called the chronic stage of aphasia.

They work to improve their language skills - reading, writing, speaking, comprehension - with spirited discussions of challenging books such as Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," Flannery O'Connor's "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." Some discover the book club online; some through the Aphasia Support Group at Cedars-Sinai; others are referred by therapists.

In this friendly and determined community of readers, I find a welcome refuge from the daily barrage of emails, texts, sped-up multitasking urban reality. When I join the group, I practice listening, not racing ahead. As the British writer Deborah Levy noted in a recent memoir: "It is always the struggle to find language that tells me it is alive, vital, of great importance." What gets communicated in this humble room is usually worth the wait.

Among those around the table today are Uma Nithipalan, a native of Sri Lanka who was an aspiring actor when she suffered her stroke at 27, 11 years ago. She announces she's just become a U.S. citizen. "Before my injury," I didn't care," she tells the group, "but now I'm awake about voting." Everyone cheers.

There's Phong Pham, in his early 30s - his aneurysm was six years ago. He emigrated from Vietnam when he was 5. "For one year, I knew no language." Now he's had to learn English a second time.

Dale Benson, a former entertainment industry professional, is seven years out from his stroke. He often references his traumatic years as a Navy SEAL: "When I came back from Vietnam. Words came at me."

Larry Arrick, 90, was a theater director and teacher. "I don't like joining anything," he says with charming gruffness, "but this is a special place."

Trice Barton was a reality TV producer. Her stroke three years ago left her paralyzed. "I was a mess. I couldn't talk. My whole left side dead. But now look at me," she says, beaming. Jeff Krol was injured years ago in a water skiing accident. "I know what's going on," he says, "but talking is hard."

Susan Swan, who taught yoga for more than 20 years, was demonstrating an asana in front of a class nine years ago when she was felled by her stroke. Soon afterward, a friend came to visit her in the hospital. "He sat on the edge of my bed and kept chattering," she told me, " 'What are you going to do? What are you going to do?' "

She looked at him and answered: "I'm going to go on."

That's what people here do. They go on.

Chekhov's stories, with their brevity and unerring descriptions of human foibles, are a good fit for the group. Barto loves the stories because they are "so clean" they're "not turning somersaults." Krol likes them because they "aren't black and white," and Nithipalan likes them because "It's today and it's a long time ago."

"The Student" follows a startling arc from despair to an epiphany of joy in three short pages. When I first read the story, I wondered if a page were missing. The story felt truncated. But when we listen together as a group to the audio version, the story peels like an onion.

Set somewhere in the Russian provinces on a bleak evening, the story introduces a student studying for the priesthood who treks home from a hunt. The weather is ghastly. He's hungry. There's no food at home. En route, he encounters two widowed working women, a mother and daughter and joins them around their fire on the eve of Good Friday.

The student's worldview abruptly changes from what transpires during the encounter; "joy fills his soul." The outside world may be cold, dark, miserable - but a great story can reach across the millennia and still move us. "The past is linked with the present," he realizes, "by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end, the other quivered."

Does this make you feel more hopeful?" Schwarz asks the group. We look to Arrick, our resident philosopher. It takes a while for him to find the words; but no one's in a hurry.

"The end of the story makes the women cry,"Arrick says. "And that's a very positive thing. People can still feel."

There's collective agreement, nodding around the table. Together, we're feeling the power of Chekhov's story, which is, as Swan notes with admiration: "Such gritty, teeth-worthy substance."
Steinman founded the Aloud lecture series at the Los Angeles Public Library and curated it for 25 years. She is the author of "The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War." For more information: contact the Echo Park Branch library: (213) 250-7808, or visit lapl.org/whats-on/events/aphasia-book-club-echo-park.

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Anton Chekhov's short story "The Student," said to be the master's favorite, is today's reading selection for the Aphasia Book Club. Aphasia Book Club, you ask? It sounds improbable. Five years ago when I first read a notice for the group, which meets weekly at the Echo Park Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, I thought it must be a misprint, even a joke.

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En este video aprendemos sobre el papel del lenguaje en la punta de vista de Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein considera que el lenguaje es la manera en que el ser humano de conocer la realidad que le rodea. Este video se relaciona con el tema de
teorias/filosofía de la lengua porque para entender lingüística es importante que se sabe las ideas de teóricos. La filosofía de Wittgenstein es un parte más importante a la historia de lingüística.

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La Filosofía del lenguaje de Wittgenstein

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En este articulo los autores responden preguntas comunes sobre PNL o Programación Neurolingüistica. PNL es un modelo donde los personas usan sus propias mentos para modificar y mejorar su calidad de comunicación con otros personas. Las ideas presentadas en este artículo son aparte del tema sobre neurolingüistica porque nos ayuda a comprender una forma diferentes en que los terapeutas usan el cerebro y su conexión con el lenguaje para mejorar la vida de las personas

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Es fácil que el concepto de Programación Neurolingüística genere confusión. ¿En qué se fundamenta? ¿Cuándo se aplica? A continuación quedan explicadas algunas ideas clave para saber qué es la PNL.

¿Qué es la Programación Neurolingüística?

Steve Bavister y Amanda Vickers (2014), definen la Programación Neurolingüística como un modelo de comunicación que se centra en identificar y usar modelos de pensamiento que influyan sobre el comportamiento de una persona como una manera de mejorar la calidad y la efectividad de la vida.

Un problema del PNL es la naturaleza de su nombre, ya que cuando se menciona el término Programación Neurolingüística a personas que nunca han oído hablar de él, la reacción suele ser un poco negativa. Por otra parte, el nombre podría suscitar que estamos ante técnicas empíricas derivadas de la neurociencias, pero no hay evidencias que constaten la eficacia de estas.

Stephen Briers (2012), dice que la PNL no es realmente un tratamiento coherente, sino "una mezcolanza de diferentes técnicas sin base teórica muy clara". Este autor sostiene que la máxima de la Programación Neurolingüística es narcisista, egocéntrica y disociada de las nociones de responsabilidad.

Además, afirma que "a veces tenemos que aceptar y llorar la muerte de nuestros sueños, no solo despedirlos ocasionalmente como cosa intrascendente. El reencuadre de PNL nos pone en el papel de un viudo evitando el dolor del duelo dando un salto hacia una relación con una mujer más joven, sin detenerse para decir un adiós apropiado a su esposa muerta".

¿En qué se centra el modelo de la Programación Neurolingüística?

El mundo se experimenta por medio de cinco sentidos: vista, oído, tacto, olfato y gusto. Mucha información viene hacía nosotros continuamente; consciente e inconscientemente eliminamos aquello a lo que no queremos prestar atención. Nos dicen que la información restante se basa en nuestras experiencias, valores y creencias pasadas. Con lo que nos acabamos quedando resulta incompleto e inexacto, ya que parte de la información general ha sido eliminada, y el resto ha sido generalizado o distorsionado.

¿En qué se basa la PNL?

Lo más importante para tener una visión sobre lo que es la Programación Neurolingüística es saber que se basa en cuatro aspectos fundamentales, los cuales se conocen como los "cuatro pilares", según Steve Bavister y Amanda Vickers (2014).

1. Resultados

Para conseguir algo, hablamos de objetivos, en la PNL se utiliza el término de resultados. Si hay una concentración previa en lo que se quiere conseguir, habrá una guía que orientará todos los recursos disponibles de esa persona a la consecución de un objetivo.

2. Agudeza sensorial

La agudeza sensorial se refiere a la capacidad de observar o detectar pequeños detalles para ser conscientes de lo que ocurre a nuestro alrededor. La gente varía mucho a la hora de darse cuenta de lo que ve, escucha o siente. Hay personas que se dedican a observar más su entorno, mientras que otras se fijan más en sus propias emociones y pensamientos.

3. Flexibilidad en el comportamiento

Cuando empiezas a saber cuáles son tus resultados y utilizas tu agudeza sensorial para observar lo que está sucediendo, la información que obtienes te permite realizar ajustes en tu comportamiento, si es necesario. Si los actos que realizas no te llevan por la dirección que deseas, es evidente que deberías intentar tomar otro camino o probar algo diferente, pero a muchas personas les falta esa flexibilidad en el comportamiento y sencillamente insisten en hacer lo mismo una y otra vez.

4. Compenetración

La compenetración se podría considerar como aquel componente que une a la gente. La mayoría de las veces ocurre de manera natural, automáticamente, instintivamente. Algunas personas que conocemos parece que comparten nuestra perspectiva vital, mientras que hay otras personas con las que no conectamos. Se ha de mejorar la capacidad de compenetración con otras personas para obtener relaciones más eficaces.

Las presuposiciones de la Programación Neurolingüística

Salvador Carrión (2008), refiere que una presuposición es algo de damos por sentado, sin ninguna prueba. Nos dice que desde la Programació Neurolingüística no se pretende que las presuposiciones sean ciertas, aunque existen evidencias bastante palpables para respaldar muchas de ellas. He intentado buscar las "evidencias" que respaldan estas presuposiciones, pero solo he encontrado una explicación a cada una de ellas.

La vida, la mente y el cuerpo son un único sistema

La mente y el cuerpo se consideran como un único sistema, cada uno influenciando directamente al otro. Por ejemplo, lo que ocurre en el interior de tu cuerpo afecta a los pensamientos y afectará a las personas de tu alrededor.

No puedes dejar de comunicarte

El mensaje que intentamos transmitir no siempre es el que los demás reciben. Por tanto, desde la PNL nos dicen que debemos estar pendientes de las reacciones de los demás para ver si nuestro mensaje ha tenido éxito. Esto en realidad puede llevar a graves dificultades a la hora de elaborar un mensaje, ya que centrarnos en las reacciones o estar en alerta ante posibles consecuencias, no es algo que vaya aportar calidad a la comunicación.

Debajo de cada comportamiento existe una intención positiva

En una adicción o un mal comportamiento siempre hay una intención positiva, por tanto encontrando la raíz de ese problema y exteriorizando la intención positiva, se puede pasar de fumar durante 15 años a no tener esa necesidad.

Si lo que estás haciendo no funciona, haz otra cosa

Si intentas una manera de abordar un problema y no obtienes los resultados que esperabas, intenta algo diferente, y sigue variando tu comportamiento hasta que consigas la respuesta que estabas buscando.

Si una persona puede hacer algo, todo el mundo puede aprender a hacerlo

Existe en la PNL, el proceso de modelar la excelencia. Si quieres que te publiquen un articulo, por ejemplo, podrías fijarte en alguien que sea brillante escribiendo y imitar la manera en que lo hace. De este modo, estarás empapándote de un conocimiento de gran valor.

Críticas hacia la Programación Nueorlingüística

Roderique-Davies (2009) afirma que usar la palabra "neuro" en PNL es "efectivamente fraudulento dado que la PNL no ofrece ninguna explicación a nivel neuronal y se podría argumentar que su uso se alimenta falazmente en la noción de credibilidad científica".

Por otra parte, Devilly (2005), sostiene que las así llamadas " terapias de poder" ganan popularidad, porque se promueven, al igual que otras pseudociencias, utilizando un conjunto de tácticas de influencia social. Estos incluyen hacer afirmaciones extraordinarias como por ejemplo, "una cura en una sola sesión para cualquier recuerdo traumático". Este tipo de estrategias son increíblemente desproporcionadas y juegan con la salud de muchas personas que deparan su confianza en profesionales con una supuesta preparación y una ética a la hora de desarrollar su actividad.

Para finalizar, Borgo (2006) refiere que las pocas herramientas eficaces o teorías más o menos comprobadas de la Programación Neurolingüística no le pertenecen en exclusiva y lo que tiene de novedoso no ha sido comprobado empíricamente. Es más, lo que tiene de novedoso, o parece muy simplista, o contradice lo que dice la ciencia.

Para saber más...

Primero de todo, te sugerimos una ampliación práctica de las cuestiones fundamentales de la PNL leyendo este artículo:

"Los 10 principios de la PNL"

En este conferencia, Javier Gil de la Universidad de Vigo nos explica en detalle más conceptos y técnicas vinculadas a la PNL.

Referencias bibliográficas:

Bavister, Steve., Vickers, Amanda. (2014). Programación Neurolingüística. Amat

Borgo, A. J. (2006). Programación Neurolingüística: El espejismo para ejecutivos. El Ojo escéptico. http://www.elojoesceptico.com.ar/revistas/eoe06/eoe0605

Briers, Steven. (2012). Exploding the myths of the Self-Help Generation. Pearson

Carrion, Salvador. (2008). Curso de practitioner en PNL: la nueva técnica para el cambio y el éxito. Obelisco

Poffel, S. A., & Cross, H. J. (1985). Neurolinguistic programming: A test of the eye-movement hypothesis. Perceptual And Motor Skills, 61, 3, 1262.doi:10.2466/pms.1985.61.

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Programación Neurolingüística (PNL) ¿Qué es y cómo funciona?

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La Programación Neurolingüística o PNL es un un modelo de comunicación que trata de identificar y usar técnicas de pensamiento para influir sobre los demás.

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En la década de 1950, Noam Chomsky y sus colegas introdujeron la idea de la gramática generativa y el concepto es que todos las personas tienen la capacidad para hablar. También el concepto de generativismo es que en tu idioma nativo la diferencia entre oraciones correctas y incorrectas es más fácil para notar. Este articulo se relaciona con el tema de las teorías de la lingüística porque Chomsky contribuyó mucho al esta disciplina.

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In linguistics, generative grammar is grammar (the set of language rules) that indicates the structure and interpretation of sentences that native speakers of a language accept as belonging to their language.

Adopting the term generative from mathematics, linguist Noam Chomsky introduced the concept of generative grammar in the 1950s. This theory is also known as transformational grammar, a term still used today.

Generative Grammar

Definition of Generative Grammar

Grammar refers to the set of rules that structure a language, including syntax (the arrangement of words to form phrases and sentences) and morphology (the study of words and how they are formed). Generative grammar is a theory of grammar that holds that human language is shaped by a set of basic principles that are part of the human brain (and even present in the brains of small children). This "universal grammar," according to linguists like Chomsky, comes from our innate language faculty.

In Linguistics for Non-Linguists: A Primer With Exercises, Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley argue that generative grammar is a kind of unconscious knowledge that allows a person, no matter what language they speak, to form "correct" sentences. They continue:

"Simply put, a generative grammar is a theory of competence: a model of the psychological system of unconscious knowledge that underlies a speaker's ability to produce and interpret utterances in a language ... A good way of trying to understand [Noam] Chomsky's point is to think of a generative grammar as essentially a definition of competence: a set of criteria that linguistic structures must meet to be judged acceptable," (Parker and Riley 2009).

Generative Vs. Prescriptive Grammar

Generative grammar is distinct from other grammars such as prescriptive grammar, which attempts to establish standardized language rules that deem certain usages "right" or "wrong," and descriptive grammar, which attempts to describe language as it is actually used (including the study of pidgins and dialects). Instead, generative grammar attempts to get at something deeper-the foundational principles that make language possible across all of humanity.

For example, a prescriptive grammarian may study how parts of speech are ordered in English sentences, with the goal of laying out rules (nouns precede verbs in simple sentences, for example). A linguist studying generative grammar, however, is more likely to be interested in issues such as how nouns are distinguished from verbs across multiple languages.

Principles of Generative Grammar

The main principle of generative grammar is that all humans are born with an innate capacity for language and that this capacity shapes the rules for what is considered "correct" grammar in a language. The idea of an innate language capacity-or a "universal grammar"-is not accepted by all linguists. Some believe, to the contrary, that all languages are learned and, therefore, based on certain constraints.

Proponents of the universal grammar argument believe that children, when they are very young, are not exposed to enough linguistic information to learn the rules of grammar. That children do in fact learn the rules of grammar is proof, according to some linguists, that there is an innate language capacity that allows them to overcome the "poverty of the stimulus."

Examples of Generative Grammar

As generative grammar is a "theory of competence," one way to test its validity is with what is called a grammaticality judgment task. This involves presenting a native speaker with a series of sentences and having them decide whether the sentences are grammatical (acceptable) or ungrammatical (unacceptable). For example:

A native speaker would judge the first sentence to be acceptable and the second to be unacceptable. From this, we can make certain assumptions about the rules governing how parts of speech should be ordered in English sentences. For instance, a "to be" verb linking a noun and an adjective must follow the noun and precede the adjective.

Parker, Frank, and Kathryn Riley. Linguistics for Non-Linguists: A Primer With Exercises. 5th ed., Pearson, 2009.

Strunk, William, and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed., Pearson, 1999.

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Generative grammar is a set of rules for the structure and interpretation of sentences that native speakers accept as belonging to the language.

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¿Quién desarrolló el concepto de generativismo?

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¿Quién desarrolló el concepto de generativismo?

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A. R. Jakobson
B. N. Chomsky
C. L. Bloomfield
D. J. Piaget

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Como leemos en el libro, la letra "h" en español puede adoptar más de un sonido distinto. Depende de dónde está la letra en la palabra y las otras letras que la rodean. Este artículo me ayuda a relacionar el argumento de la "h" silenciosa con el libro y cómo no está en silencio cuando con "c". Este artículo da ejemplos de pronunciación para escuchar los diferentes sonidos producidos.

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There are only 2 regular silent letters in the Spanish language.

You'll need to take care with both of these letters because they are silent in some words and pronounced in others.

In addition, when I say 'regular' silent letters I'm referring to the pronunciation of traditional Spanish words, not words that have been adopted from Greek or other languages.

In this post, I'll give an overview of the the two silent letters in Spanish including where and how you need to use them.

Since this post is about pronunciation, I'll also include some short mp3 recordings to demonstrate what the words sound like in order to avoid any confusion with phonetic spelling.

The letter H

The first silent letter in Spanish is the letter H. This letter is always silent unless it is next to the letter C.

When you see the letter C next to an H you need to make a ch sound. This sound is almost identical to the "ch" sound in English.

In the Spanish alphabet, the word that represents the letter H is hache. Since this word starts with an H and has a ch, it makes for a great first example to demonstrate the pronunciation of H and ch.

Here are two more examples of words that also start with H:

Here are two examples with the letter H in the middle of the word:

(notice how the H creates a 'gap' between the A and the O)

(similarly notice the H creates an elongation between the two middle O's)

To finish the section on the letter H, here are two examples with a ch:

The letter U

In the majority of Spanish words with a U, the sound you need to make to represent the U is like a double "oo" in English and rhymes with the English word "too".

Here are two examples of words with the typical pronunciation of the Spanish letter U:

In contract, the letter U is silent in Spanish words when it is next to a Q or sandwiched in between a G and an E or a G and an I as gui and gue.

Here are some examples with U after a Q:

Here are some examples with a gui:

Here are some examples with a gue:

To make things slightly more confusing, whenever you see a Ü in Spanish with a double dot, you need to pronounce the U sound. You will see this letter in situations like the last two examples as either a güe or a güi.

Here are some examples with a güi:

Here are some examples with a güe:

Adopted silent letters from other languages

At the start of the post I mentioned that there are silent letters that occur in words that have been adopted from other languages such as Greek.

Here are a few examples:

These are fairly low use words so I don't recommend you spend too much time on them (unless you are a psychologist and need this word to explain what you do).

Your Turn

Choose some examples from this post and practice the pronunciation by copying recordings. Also try them out with a Spanish native in a language exchange or with a teacher.

As a bonus for reading this post, if you sign up to the Real Fast Spanish School and mention this post in an email, I will offer you a free one-on-one Skype lesson as another opportunity to practice your pronunciation.

If you would like to learn more about pronunciation check out this podcast episode.

How can you remember the silent letters in Spanish?

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Silent Letters in Spanish: These are The Only Two You Need to Know

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There are only 2 regular silent letters in the Spanish language. You'll need to take care with both of these letters because they are silent in some words and pronounced in others. In addition, when I say 'regular' silent letters I'm referring to the pronunciation of traditional Spanish words, not words that have been adopted from Greek or other languages.

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Un tema adicional del libro fue cómo la mayoría de los hispanohablantes pueden trinarse la lengua. Este video muestra ejercicios para que su lengua y boca puedan adquirir esta habilidad. La habilidad no parece ser genética, pero algunas personas pueden tener este rasgo después de la terapia y la práctica. Para algunas personas que aún no pueden obtener este rasgo, este video es muy interesante y útil para aprender.

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How to roll your R's - Exercises that work!

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Este artículo es relevante para el segundo tema de esta clase porque tiene la definición de pares mínimos. Para comprender las otras partes de este capítulo, es importante poder reconocer lo que se considera un par mínimo. Este artículo tiene ejemplos y una definición muy simple para que sea más fácil de entender. El artículo habla sobre la diferencia entre un fonema y un alófono también.

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Cualquier hispanohablante sabe sin titubeos que son cinco las vocales, como todo el mundo sabe: a, e, i, o, u. En español la correspondencia de letras y de fonemas vocálicos es simétrica.

Sin embargo, tenemos que preguntarnos cómo hemos llegado a esta situación desde las diez vocales que tenía el latín y por qué la mayoría de las lenguas romances tienen, al menos, siete.

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¿Qué es un par mínimo en fonética? ‹ Glosario de términos lingüísticos

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Cualquier hispanohablante sabe sin titubeos que son cinco las vocales, como todo el mundo sabe: a, e, i, o, u. En español la correspondencia de letras y de fonemas vocálicos es simétrica. Sin embargo, tenemos que preguntarnos cómo hemos llegado a esta situación desde las diez vocales que tenía el latín y por qué la mayoría de las lenguas romances tienen, al menos, siete.

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Para alguien que no es un hablante nativo de español, puede ser difícil sonar como un hablante nativo. Este video ayuda a relacionar la silabicación con la pronunciación. El video también contiene información útil sobre cómo dividir correctamente las sílabas y formas útiles de entender diferentes palabras. El video se relaciona con la clase porque para transcribirlos fonéticamente debes conocer las divisiones de sílabas.

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Improve your Spanish Accent - Dividing Words into Syllables

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Learn how to divide Spanish words into syllables. Knowing how to divide words into syllables is an easy way to improve your accent when speaking Spanish. If all words were one syllable long then it would be pretty easy. The longer they are, the more difficult it becomes.

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En este artículo estudiamos cómo se crearon nuevas palabras en inglés. El artículo incluye los componentes importantes de la morfología como palabras compuestas, prefijos y sufijos. Describen cuántas palabras se tomaron prestadas de otros idiomas, como la palabra "orange" derivada de naranja. También cómo los prefijos permiten una cantidad infinita de flexibilidad. Continúan discutiendo cómo se juntan dos palabras para formar una nueva palabra llamada palabra compuesta.

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The History of English - How New Words Are Created

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The History of English - How New Words Are Created

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Este artículo es muy útil para comprender cómo se utilizan los sufijos flexivos para describir el modo, el tiempo y el aspecto. El artículo comienza diciendo que debes entender qué es un sufijo para poder aplicar el concepto a las funciones. Se relaciona con la clase porque hemos estado estudiando el TAM de un verbo y cuánto significado agrega al contexto del verbo.

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Ampliar este tema:

Quizás lo más conveniente, previo a abordar la definición de Sufijos flexivos de modo, tiempo y aspecto, sea revisar de forma breve algunos conceptos, que resultarán indispensables a la hora de entender, dentro de su contexto lingüístico, este tipo de sufijos.

Definiciones fundamentales

En este sentido, puede que también sea pertinente centrar dicha revisión teórica a cinco conceptos básicos: Sufijos, Sufijos flexivos, así como las respectivas definiciones de los accidentes verbales: Modo, Tiempo y Aspecto. A continuación, cada uno de ellos:

Los sufijos

De esta forma, se comenzará por decir que la Lingüística ha definidos a los Sufijos como uno de los cinco tipos de afijos, que pueden contemplarse dentro de las Lenguas naturales. Así mismo, son entendidos como estructuras lingüísticas o morfemas tónicos, que se insertan en la palabra de forma posterior, contando con la capacidad de incidir directamente sobre la categoría gramatical de la palabra a la cual se anexan.

Por otro lado, esta disciplina también indica que los sufijos cumplirán con dos funciones básicas al unirse a la palabra: bien sea señalar los accidentes gramaticales de esta, o por el contrario generar una nueva palabra, con independencia semántica con respecto a la que le ha dado origen. En este último aspecto, la Lingüística también afirma que la sufijación es el mecanismo más usado por las lenguas derivativas, las cuales además son las más comunes.

Sufijos flexivos

Sin embargo, la sufijación no solo ocasionará la creación de una nueva palabra, sino que puede servir para constituir todas las formas que pueda tener una palabra según sus distintos accidentes gramaticales. En consecuencia, los Sufijos flexivos serán aquellos que sirvan para llevar a cabo los procesos de flexión en una palabra, construyendo entonces las distintas formas que ocasionen los accidentes que sufre, según su contexto lingüístico.

Modo, Tiempo y Aspecto del verbo

Por otro lado, también será importante prestar atención a la definición de los accidentes gramaticales conocidos como Modo, Tiempo y Aspecto, a fin de poder entender mucho más cabalmente qué es lo que conforman los sufijos flexivos que los introducen a la palabra. A continuación una breve descripción de cada uno de ellos:

Modo: en primer lugar, el Modo será el accidente verbal que hará que el hablante pueda interpretar cuál es la actitud de su interlocutor, respecto a la acción a la cual se refiere. De esta forma, en el Español se conciben básicamente tres modos verbales: Indicativo (cuando el hablante se refiere a un hecho de forma objetiva); Subjuntiva (si el hablante usa la acción para señalar un deseo, duda o temor) e Imperativa (cuando el hablante apela a su interlocutor para expresar un deseo, una petición o incluso una orden).

Tiempo: por su parte, el Tiempo es el accidente verbal que sirve para señalar en qué momento preciso tiene lugar la acción a la que hace referencia el verbo. Por lo general, en el Español, se distinguen tres tiempos básicos: Pasado, Presente y Futuro. Sin embargo, la Gramática también distingue entre tiempos simples (cuando el verbo está compuesto por una sola palabra: un verbo) o compuestos (cuando está compuesto por dos palabras: verbo auxiliar + verbo).

Aspecto: siendo uno de los accidentes verbales menos estudiados, el Aspecto cumple con la función de señalar si la acción a la que se refiere el verbo ya fue realizada, o por el contrario se encuentra en proceso de realizarse, quedando su culminación para un momento posterior. En tal sentido, en el Español, se distinguen dos aspectos verbales: Perfectivo (cuando la acción ya se ha dado por terminada) e Imperfectiva (cuando la acción no se ha dado por concluida).

Sufijos flexivos de modo-tiempo-aspectos

Teniendo presente estas definiciones, quizás ciertamente sea mucho más sencillo abordar el concepto de Sufijos flexivos, los cuales pueden ser entendidos entonces como aquellos morfemas, que se anexan de forma posterior a la palabra, para formar un verbo, de acuerdo al modo, tiempo y aspecto que este deba tener, según las necesidades exigidas por su contexto lingüístico.

Entre algunos de los ejemplos que pueden surgir respecto a este tipo de sufijos flexivos, se encuentran los siguientes:

Oír → o yeron (Indicativo-Pretérito- Perfectivo)
Bailar → baila s (Indicativo-Presente-Imperfectivo)
Cantar → cantar ía (Indicativo-Pasado-Imperfectivo)

Imagen: pixabay.com

Sufijos flexivos para modo-tiempo-aspecto

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Ampliar este tema: Quizás lo más conveniente, previo a abordar la definición de Sufijos flexivos de modo, tiempo y aspecto, sea revisar de forma breve algunos conceptos, que resultarán indispensables a la hora de entender, dentro de su contexto lingüístico, este tipo de sufijos.

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En este video aprendemos sobre el proceso de nominalización que es la transformación de un verbo o adjetivo en un sustantivo. Explica los sufijos diferentes que se pueden agregar al final de un verbo, por ejemplo, "-ción" agregado al final de un verbo indica un proceso o el resultado de una acción. Ella revisa muchos otros ejemplos en el video que también son útiles.

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En esta página sobre etimología podemos recibir una mejor comprensión de las raíces de las palabras. El estudio de la formación y el origen de las palabras se llama etimología y se relaciona con la clase porque hemos estado identificando diferentes raíces de las palabras. Por ejemplo, la raíz "bio" significa "vida" en biología, biografía y bioquímica. Al conocer el significado de una palabra raíz podemos formar palabras compuestas y construir familias de palabras

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Este sitio web es útil para los estudiantes en la clase porque habla sobre qué son los sintagmas. Se enumeran los diferentes tipos de sintagmas que son los mismos de los que hablamos en clase. Hay una página para cada tipo de sintagma con una definición y ejemplos. por ejemplo, hay una página para sintagma nominal que tiene una estructura de (Determinante) + Núcleo + (Complemento del núcleo).

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Un sintagma es un grupo de palabras que desempeña una misma función sintáctica en la oración. La parte más importante de un sintagma es el núcleo que puede ser un sustantivo, un verbo, un adjetivo o un adverbio.

El sintagma puede desempeñar numerosas funciones en la oración como: sujeto, complemento directo, atributo, complemento indirecto, complemento circunstancial, complemento predicativo, complemento de régimen y complemento agente.

Cada sintagma puede contener además otros sintagmas. Cada uno de estos sintagmas tiene una función distinta que hay que especificar al realizar el análisis sintáctico de una oración.

Tipos de sintagmas

Existen varios tipos de sintagmas según la categoría gramatical del núcleo:

Clasificación de sintagmas:

Sintagma nominal (SN): es un sintagma cuyo núcleo es un nombre, pronombre o palabra sustantivada. Se designa con la abreviatura SN.

Sintagma verbal (SV): está formado por un núcleo (verbo predicativo) y por complementos verbales (CD, CI, CC...). Se designa con la abreviatura SV.

Sintagma adjetival (SAdj): está constituido por un núcleo (adjetivo), por cuantificadores y complementos del adjetivo. Se designa con la abreviatura SAdj.

Sintagma adverbial (SAdv): está formado por un núcleo (adverbio), por cuantificadores y complementos del adverbio. Se designa con la abreviatura SAdv.

Sintagma preposicional (SPrep): está formado por una preposición (enlace) más un complemento de preposición (término). Se designa con la abreviatura SPrep.

Siguiente: S. nominal

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Un sintagma es un grupo de palabras que desempeña una misma función sintáctica en la oración. La parte más importante de un sintagma es el núcleo que puede ser un sustantivo, un verbo, un adjetivo o un adverbio.

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En esta página se nos proporciona información muy útil sobre oraciones compuestas. Se dice que las oraciones compuestas están formadas por varias oraciones simples juntas. Hay un gráfico útil que muestra la diferencia en una oración coordinada compuesto frente una oración compuesta yuxtaposición. La principal diferencia entre los dos es que las oraciones de yuxtaposición compuesta usan un punto y coma para separar las dos cláusulas.

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Por- Linda Ojeda

Las oraciones compuestas son aquellas que tienen dos o más relaciones sujeto-predicado, es decir, que varias oraciones simples se asocian para presentar un mensaje. Según la relación que haya entre los predicados las oraciones compuestas se clasifican en coordinadas, subordinadas o yuxtapuestas. Las oraciones compuestas coordinadas unen dos o más proposiciones independientes por medio de conjunciones y se clasifican, según el nexo coordinante que se utilice, en: copulativas, disyuntivas, adversativas y distributivas. En la oración subordinada hay dependencia de un segmento con respecto a la proposición principal. Por último, las oraciones yuxtapuestas separan las proposicones, independientes entre sí, con una coma o un punto y coma en lugar de un nexo coordinante.
Oraciones compuestas coordinadas y yuxtapuestas Oraciones compuestas subordinadas
La oración subordinada está compuesta de una proposición principal y una proposición dependiente. La proposición principal recibe el nombre de subordinante y la proposición dependiente recibe el nombre de subordinada. Según la función que desempeñe la proposición dependiente (subordinada), suele clasificarse en subordinada sustantiva, subordinada de relativo o subordinada adverbial.

Observa:

1. Subordinada sustantiva - Realiza la función de un sustantivo, como sujeto o complemento directo;
regularmente comienza con la conjunción que.

Ejemplos:
Que llegues bien es mi mejor deseo. (sujeto)
Esperamos que regreses pronto. (complemento directo)

2. Subordinada de relativo - Tradicinalmente, recibía el nombre de subordinada adjetiva, pero no
siempre ejerce esa función. Las proposiciones subordinadas comienzan con:
a. pronombres relativos - que, quien, cual.
b. adverbios relativos - como, cuanto, cuando, donde.
c. determinate (porque precede al sustantivo) - cuyo.

Ejemplos:
El vestido que tiene flores azules es de mi prima.
La niña cuya madre fue galardonada ayer es amiga de mi hija.

3. Subordinada adverbial - No siempre desempeña la función de un adverbio, aunque su nombre así lo
indique. Ofrecen información adicional o incidental en la que expresan las circuntancias
en que ocurre la acción de la proposición subordinante.

Ejemplos:
No puedo acompañarte porque estoy castigada. (construcción causal)
Corrí tanto que me duelen las rodillas. (construcción consecutiva)

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Por- Linda Ojeda Las oraciones compuestas son aquellas que tienen dos o más relaciones sujeto-predicado, es decir, que varias oraciones simples se asocian para presentar un mensaje. Según la relación que haya entre los predicados las oraciones compuestas se clasifican en coordinadas, subordinadas o yuxtapuestas.

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Aunque este artículo es sobre gramática inglesa, sigue siendo relevante para la clase porque el libro también habló sobre el orden de las palabras en inglés. El orden más común de las oraciones es sujeto, verbo y luego objeto o SVO. En español, este es el orden de palabras más común también, por ejemplo, yo (S) compré (V) una computadora nueva (O).

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English Grammar Explanations - Word order

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Grammar practice for ESL students: Word order.

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Este artículo habla sobre las diferentes formas en que una persona puede usar "se" en sus oraciones para expresar diferentes cosas. El artículo está escrito para personas que están aprendiendo español, por lo que hace un buen trabajo al describir todos los diferentes tipos en detalle. El autor separa los usos de "se" en cuatro categorías que están en verbos pronominales, al combinar pronombres de objeto directos e indirectos, el se impersonal y el se pasivo.

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If you have ever been curious about how se can appear in multiple contexts, you'll see in this post how you can use it in sentences to reduce blame, to hide guilty parties and to make generalisations.

Not to be confused with the Spanish word sé (I know) from saber or the imperative command sé (be...!) from ser, the pronoun se is an extremely versatile Spanish word.

In this post, I'll share the 4 uses of the Spanish pronoun se to ensure you are never puzzled by this word again.

Use 1. In pronominal verbs

In Spanish, there are two types of verbs that are categorised as pronominal: reflexive verbs and reciprocal verbs. Often the term reflexive gets used to talk about both types of verbs. But, in reality, they are slightly different.

In this article, the reason I have categorised reflexive and reciprocal verbs together is because the pronoun se is used in the same way for both types of verbs.

In these verbs, the pronoun se is used to indicate that the object and the subject of the sentence are the same.

I'll take you through some examples for each type of pronominal verb.

In reflexive sentences the object and the subject of the sentence are the same and the subject could be one, two or many different people. Here are a few examples:

In both of these examples, if you removed the pronoun se, the sentences would be incomplete.

For example, if you said the second sentence without the se:
Mis hijos lavan antes de la cena cada noche.
The listener would ask the question 'washed what?'.

You could say 'their clothes':

But, if you meant to say themselves, you need to ensure you include the pronoun se.

In contrast to reflexive sentences, in reciprocal sentences the object and the subject of the sentence are typically two different people doing the same thing to each other. Here are a few examples:

Again, if you removed the pronoun se, these sentences wouldn't make sense. If you said ellos besaron, the person you are speaking with would ask 'who did they kiss?'.

Before moving on, I'll also point out that the phrase " el uno al otro" means "each other". This phrase gives you a hint that the sentence is most likely reciprocal and will need the word se included before the conjugated verb.

Use 2. When combining direct and indirect object pronouns

The second use of the pronoun se is for sentences that combine direct objects and indirect objects.

In Spanish, the words lo, la, los and las can be used to replace direct objects. A quick example:

This can be shortened to:

You can then use the words le and les to substitute for indirect objects. For example:

This can be shortened to:

The next step is to combine direct and indirect objects, but there is a problem that occurs.

If you start with this sentence:

When you try to shorten this sentence with direct object pronouns and indirect object pronouns, you get:

But, les los isn't correct. Why?

Try saying les los di three times fast.

Now, instead say se los di three times fast.

Hopefully, you can see that se actually makes life easier for you here.

Since the point of direct and indirect pronouns is to make life easy, the pronoun se is used to replace both le and les in these types of sentences to avoid a tongue twister.

Here is a summary of how you should replace se in these sentences:

Here are two more examples:

These constructions are important for hacking Spanish grammar, you can read more about Spanish grammar shortcuts with the 13 grammar hacking sentences here.

Use 3. The impersonal se

Similar to how reflexive and reciprocal verbs are sometimes referred to as the same, so too are impersonal and passive verbs.

I have incorrectly referred to impersonal verbs as passive verbs a number of times on the blog and podcast. But, like pronominal verbs, the name doesn't really matter.

What does matter is that you recognise the behaviour and role of the pronoun se in these sentences.

For now, an impersonal sentence is a sentence where the subject is completely generalised. This means you could talk about rules or make comment on the general behaviour of people in your city or country.

For example:
They say that you should eat vegetables every day. One cannot smoke here.
Here, the idea of 'one' or 'they' isn't anybody specific.

When you form these ideas in Spanish, the word se replaces 'one' or 'they' from English. Here are a few examples:

Last week I wrote an article about the Spanish verb encontrar. In that article, I gave the following example:

Another (and more common) way to ask this question is by using the impersonal se:

This question is now no longer about you or the person you are speaking with but anybody who may want to find tapas in the neighbourhood.

Use 4. The passive se

In contrast to the impersonal se, the passive se is used when the subject of the sentence is someone or something specific but is omitted from the sentence for various reasons.

You may want to omit the subject in a passive sentence if the subject isn't relevant, if the subject isn't known, or to reduce blame.

Here are some examples:

In this last example, the problems were solved by someone specific (or multiple people). But, the reason the sentence is presented this way is because the most important thing is the fact that the problems were solved. It doesn't really matter by who.

Also, if you omitted the se from this example, it would sound like the problems were solving something else which doesn't make sense in this context. Particularly, since there isn't another object in the sentence.

Last few examples:

When you forget something in Spanish, you often do it with a passive construction to highlight that you forgot by accident. Similarly, you could say:

In both of these examples, the speaker is trying to reduce the blame for their mistake. The best literal translations would be 'the tickets were forgotten to me' and 'the computer was broken to me'.

In fact, if you said:

In Spanish, this could be interpreted that you broke the computer on purpose (or through pretty heavy negligence).

Your Turn

As you can see, the Spanish pronoun se is definitely not straightforward.

The best way to get used to these sentences is to put them into action.

This week, construct some sentences using the impersonal se about how things are done in general in your country.

Also, try using the passive se to talk about something important that happened in your life recently and see if you can omit the subject of the sentence.

How else can you use the pronoun se in a Spanish sentence?

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4 Ways to Use "Se" to Express Yourself More Broadly

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If you have ever been curious about how se can appear in multiple contexts, you'll see in this post how you can use it in sentences to reduce blame, to hide guilty parties and to make generalisations. Not to be confused with the Spanish word sé (I know) from saber or the imperative command sé (be...!)

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En este artículo, se puede ver toda la información sobre el Apéndice Probi. La información presentada aquí se basa más en hechos interesantes. Resumen los consejos que dio el apéndice y los errores que la gente común cometió en latín. Estos errores latinos se llevaron a la forma en que se hablan otras lenguas romances.

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Sometime around the 7th century, a grammarian got fed up and started collecting all the annoying mistakes that people kept making in Latin. He wrote them up in the , a straightforward list of the "say this, not that" variety. The most interesting thing about the Appendix Probi is not that it shows that people have always been making usage errors, but that the errors people made in Latin show the specific ways that Latin turned into its descendants, the Romance languages, including Spanish, French, and Italian.

1. FEBRUARIUS NON FEBRARIUS

2. AURIS NON ORICLA

3. CALIDA NON CALDA

Another change from Latin to the Romance languages was the loss of unstressed vowels in the middle of a word. The Appendix says it should be "calida non calda," and "viridis non virdis." These days the words for warm and for green in Italian ( calda, verde) and French ( chaud, vert) are still missing that internal extra syllable.

4. EXEQUIAE NON EXECIAE

Some widespread changes in Latin's descendants, like the change from a /kw/ to a /k/ sound, make frequent appearances on the list, ( exequiae non execiae, equs non ecus, coqus non cocus, coquens non cocens, coqui non coci) even when they don't address specific surviving words that changed. There's no complaint about quomodo (how) becoming comodo, but that's what happened when it turned into como (Spanish) and comment (French) in the descendant languages. The Appendix is evidence that that particular sound change was already well underway.

5. TABULA NON TABLA

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5 Annoying Latin Errors from an Ancient List That Predicted Latin's Descendants

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Sometime around the 7th century, a grammarian got fed up and started collecting all the annoying mistakes that people kept making in Latin. He wrote them up in the 'Appendix Probi,' a straightforward list of the "say this, not that" variety.

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Este artículo trata sobre la obra maestra literaria de Don Quijote. Aprendemos algunos datos interesantes sobre la historia y que fue considerada la primera novela moderna. El segundo hecho interesante es que a Cervantes, el autor, se le ocurrió la idea en la cárcel. Otro hecho interesante es que hubo una secuela falsa que pudo haberlo convencido de hacer su propia secuela.

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Even if you have never picked up a copy of Miguel de Cervantes's novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, you're doubtlessly familiar with the story: one of delusional noblemen, portly squires, and windmill monsters. Nevertheless, there could be a few little-known facts you haven't heard about the two-volume 17th-century masterpiece.

1. DON QUIXOTE IS CONSIDERED THE FIRST MODERN NOVEL.

Such esteemed thinkers as award-winning literary critic Harold Bloom and decorated novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes have declared that Don Quixote is the very first true example of the modern novel. Bloom identifies the arcs of change bracing the story's titular character and his companion Sancho Panza as the primary marker that distinguishes it as the first of its breed, and Fuentes suggested that the nuance in the dialogue and characterization is chief in separating Don Quixote from all preceding texts.

2. CERVANTES CAME UP WITH THE STORY WHILE HE WAS IN JAIL.

Though he'd eventually go on to pen one of the most famous novels in world history, a young Miguel de Cervantes suffered from a plight familiar to any aspiring writer: working a day job to pay the bills. Among the varied gigs Cervantes kept in the years before his literary breakout was a job as a tax collector for the Spanish government. However, frequent "mathematic irregularities" landed Cervantes in the Crown Jail of Seville twice between 1597 and 1602. It was during this time in the slammer that Cervantes is believed to have first thought up the story that would become Don Quixote.

3. CERVANTES NAMED THE MAIN CHARACTER AFTER HIS WIFE'S UNCLE.

Near the conclusion of the second volume of Don Quixote, Cervantes reveals the real name of his hero to be Alonso Quixano (alternatively spelled "Quijano"). He borrowed this name from Alonso de Quesada y Salazar, the great uncle of Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, whom Cervantes married in 1584. Alonso is believed to have inspired not only the name but also the general characterization of the novel's hero. And, the name Quixote came from the word for " thigh armor."

4. CERVANTES PLUGGED DON QUIXOTE: PART II IN THE FOREWORD OF ANOTHER STORY.

Cervantes released the 12-part novella collection Novelas ejemplares in 1613 after having penned the series incrementally over the eight-year span that followed the publication of the original volume of Don Quixote. A foreword to the collection not only introduced the new work, but also promised readers that Cervantes was planning a continuation of the incomplete Gentleman of La Mancha fable. (His advertisement for an upcoming book ahead of an entirely independent work could be seen as an ancestor to the modern day movie trailer.) This second volume was published two years later, in 1615.

5. A PHONY PART II WAS PUBLISHED AS A HOAX.

Just one year after Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares foreword plug, however, a volume of mysterious origin wormed its way into the Don Quixote canon. Written by an author who used the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, the unofficial sequel was infamous for the feeble quality of writing and the numerous potshots it took at Cervantes and the source material.

6. THIS FAKE SEQUEL IS THOUGHT TO HAVE CONVINCED CERVANTES TO FINISH HIS OWN.

Although Cervantes had already gone on record about intending to wrap up the story of Don Quixote in a second text, it is generally believed that the Avellaneda debacle was the straw that broke the camel's back and motivated the author to transfer his intentions to the page. Cervantes was so enraged by the hoax that he wrote the existence of Avellaneda's novel into his own Part II, maligning it for poor quality and misunderstanding of his original characters and story.

7. DON QUIXOTE HELPED ESTABLISH THE MODERN SPANISH LANGUAGE.

The variant of the Spanish language in which Cervantes penned his novel was actually a rather new development at the turn of the 17th century and would be much more familiar to contemporary Spanish speakers than the colloquial tongue of the era. The popularity of Don Quixote cemented the modern Spanish that is now the second most commonly spoken language in the world, behind Mandarin.

8. CERVANTES DREW FROM HIS EXPERIENCES AS A SLAVE TO WRITE THE NOVEL.

A particularly empathetic sequence in the novel sees the hero and Sancho Panza freeing a group of galley slaves from captivity. Cervantes' special sensitivity to these recipients of Don Quixote's chivalry likely stems from his own experiences in servitude in the 1570s. Cervantes spent five years as a slave in Algiers, attempting escape on more than one occasion.

9. THE NOVEL IS CREDITED FOR THE SPREAD OF A POPULAR IDIOM.

Today, the proverb "the proof is in the pudding" is a regular fixture in the vernacular. The phrase is in fact a corruption of the somewhat more readily coherent-albeit admittedly less euphonic-variant, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." While the latter traces roots to a 14th century-born Middle English predecessor (" Jt is ywrite that euery thing Hymself sheweth in the tastyng") and would appear in various similar forms for the next few hundred years, the modern phrasing is in fact believed to have debuted in an 18th century English-language translation of Don Quixote. The phrase was introduced by translator Pierre Antoine Motteux in lieu of Cervantes' original maxim: " al freír de los huevos lo verá," or "you will see when the eggs are fried."

10. THE FIRST TRANSLATION OF DON QUIXOTE WAS TOO LITERAL.

The very first translation of Don Quixote was Dublin-born author Thomas Shelton's English take on the text, published in 1608. Shelton didn't exemplify quite the same degree of linguistic creativity as his successor Motteux. The former's rigid adherence to Cervantes' diction, in fact, was his publication's greatest downfall. For instance, where an English speaker would substitute the word "inches" at Cervantes' idiomatic mention of " dedos," Shelton applied the literal translation: "fingers."

11. A FAMOUS AUTHOR CITED DON QUIXOTE AS HIS FAVORITE LITERARY CHARACTER.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky committed his admiration for Don Quixote to print on numerous occasions. In a letter to his niece Sophia Ivanova, Dostoevsky heralded Cervantes' protagonist as the superlative literary hero: "Of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote," adding, "but he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous."

12. ONE ORGANIZATION DEEMED THE BOOK THE GREATEST PIECE OF LITERATURE EVER WRITTEN.

In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club polled esteemed writers across 54 countries to construct a list of the 100 greatest books ever published, naming the project the Bokklubben World Library. The official stance of the list, which covers literature as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and as recent as José Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness, is that all represented titles enjoy equal footing. That is, with the one exception: Don Quixote, which the Bokklubben World Library distinguishes as "the best literary work ever written."

13. THE BOOK HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO AT LEAST 50 LANGUAGES.

Today, Don Quixote boasts prints in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Latin, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Romanian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Irish, Gaelic, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Georgian, Esperanto, Yiddish, and Braille.

14. CERVANTES DID NOT PROFIT OFF OF THE SUCCESS OF DON QUIXOTE.

Despite the near-immediate popularity of the original 1605 novel, Cervantes barely made a dime off its publication, since it was common in the 17th century for a writer to be denied royalties on his or her published works. The ramifications of this setup could be seen as especially harsh in the case of Don Quixote, considering the fact that...

15. DON QUIXOTE MIGHT BE THE BEST-SELLING NOVEL OF ALL TIME.

While the age of the novel makes it hard to fully estimate the scope of its distribution, many scholars estimate that it has reached a readership of 500 million. This figure would make it the best selling novel in world history by far, topping Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities' 200 million count and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy's 150 million count.

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15 Things You Might Not Know About Don Quixote

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Even if you have never picked up a copy of Miguel de Cervantes's novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, you're doubtlessly familiar with the story: one of delusional noblemen, portly squires, and windmill monsters. Nevertheless, there could be a few little-known facts you haven't heard about the two-volume 17th-century masterpiece.

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Este artículo explica cómo los idiomas cambian constantemente. Aprendemos que las palabras que más usamos son las palabras que evolucionan a la velocidad más lenta. Los investigadores también encontraron que las palabras que más se usan en español son las mismas que las que más se usan en inglés, incluso si no son cognados.

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The words used the most in everyday language are the ones evolving at the slowest rate, say two new studies published in Nature.

In one paper, researchers at Harvard University focused on the evolution of English verb conjugations over a 1,200-year period. In a separate study, a team at the University of Reading in England reviewed cognates (similar sounding words in different languages for the same object or meaning, such as "water" and the German " wasser") to determine how all Indo-European tongues progressed from a common ancestor that existed between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.

"What our frequency effect allows us to do is identify...ultraconserved linguistic elements," says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biology professor at Reading, about his research. "Namely, they're the words we use all the time."

In their search for cognates, Pagel and his team examined some 200 words in 87 Indo-European languages, including those for "water," "two," "to die" and "where." The number of distinct classes of cognates for each word ranged from one (indicating all the words sound similar) for frequently used concepts such as numbers to as many as 46 different basic sounds to describe a single entity such as a bird. The word for the number three in all Indo-European languages, for instance, is similar to the English version: from tres in Spanish to drei in German to the Hindi theen. In contrast, the word for bird has several different sounds associated with it like pajaro in Spanish and oiseau in French.

The researchers then narrowed their focus to the frequency of use of each of the words in just four Indo-European languages-English, Spanish, Greek and Russian. Pagel says the team found that they were used at similar rates across the board even if the words with the same meaning were not cognates. "The high frequency words in Spanish are the same as the high frequency English," he says. "That [indicated] that we could come up with a kind of Indo-European frequency of use."

By combining their data, the researchers determined that it would take as little as 750 years to replace less-used words and up to 10,000 years for new words to evolve in place of the most frequently used ones.

The Harvard researchers specifically studied the roots of English, tracing verb conjugations in the language from the time of Beowulf 1,200 years ago through Shakespeare in the 16th century to its current form. Over the years, several past tense forms of verbs have died out in English and now only one persists as a rule: adding "-ed" to the end of verbs. (Verbs that end in "-ed" in their past tense form "regular verbs" in modern English.)

Researchers scoured grammatical texts dating back to the days of Old English, cataloguing all the irregular verbs they came across. Among them: the still irregular "sing" / "sang," "go" / "went" as well as the since-regularized "smite" which once was "smote" in Old English but since has become "smited," and "slink," which is now "slinked" but 1,200 years ago was "slunk." They located 177 verbs that were irregular in Old English and 145 that were still irregular in Middle English; today, only 98 of the 177 verbs have not been "regularized.'"

After calculating the frequency of use of each of the 177 irregular Old English verbs, researchers determined that the words that evolved most quickly into regular conjugational forms were used significantly less than those that went unchanged over time. In fact, their statistical analysis determined that given two verbs, if one was used 100 times less frequently than the other, it would evolve 10 times faster than the verb employed more often. They predict the next verb to fall into line will be wed, the past tense of which will regularize from wed to wedded.

By being more frequent, a verb is more stable," says study co-author Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard University. He adds that both the Harvard and Reading papers lay out a case for a version of natural selection that acts on linguistic evolution and mirrors biological evolution. "Both studies," he says, "illustrate this profound effect that frequency has in the survival of a word."

Partha Niyogi, author of the book The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution and a professor of computer science and statistics at the University of Chicago, says these empirical findings are consistent with theoretical models on the lexical evolution. "Languages are constantly changing," he notes. "In biological evolution that fact has been given a lot of attention, but the fact is that in languages this is happening all the time, [as well]. Darwin in [ The Descent of Man] commented that languages were evolving over time, and it was just like speciation."

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Use It or Lose It: Why Language Changes over Time

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The words used the most in everyday language are the ones evolving at the slowest rate, say two new studies published in Nature. In one paper, researchers at Harvard University focused on the evolution of English verb conjugations over a 1,200-year period.

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Datos interesantes sobre el idioma español.

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Datos interesantes sobre el idioma español.

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En este sitio web aprendemos todos los datos interesantes sobre el idioma español. Antes de que el autor comience a enumerar los hechos, afirma que es importante conocer algunos pequeños detalles porque puede facilitar el aprendizaje del idioma. También separan los hechos por tema. Hay hechos para sintaxis, pronunciación, vocabulario e historia / cultura. Uno de mis hechos favoritos es el número 11 y dice que hay más de treinta mil palabras que contienen las 5 vocales.

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Calling all linguaphiles, trivia buffs, students, teachers, and world travelers - you probably already know that a country's language carries many clues about its history, culture, and values. Understanding the intricacies can often make it easier to learn a language, also, since you'll likely recognize patterns, or how certain language relate to each other.

The Spanish language in particular is really cool to learn about, as you'll see in this post! We got help from our tutors to compile a list of a whopping 50 interesting facts about the language of Spain, as a way to test your own knowledge.

But first, a few FAQs you should definitely know...

Where is Spanish used?

When you think about Spanish speakers, you likely think about Spain and Mexico. But actually, Spanish is the offical language for more than 20 countries - including Cuba, Argentina, Chile, and Nicaragua.

It's also worth noting that it's not the ONLY language spoken in Spain. Other official languages of Spain are Galician, Basque, and Catalan.

Who else speaks Spanish?

It's no wonder that many students, business professionals, and travelers choose to learn Spanish - it's estimated that almost 400 million people worldwide speak the language! Moreover, being bilingual has tons of benefits.

Not only that, but it's becoming one of the most widely-spoken second languages in the world.

Ok, now test your knowledge!

The infographic below showcases the most interesting facts we found. See how many of them you already know, and then scroll down to learn even more about the Spanish language!

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Spanish Grammar & Syntax

1. If taken literally, the word la persona (person) is feminine, even though it may refer to a man or a woman.[1]

2. Nouns that end in -a are usually feminine, but if they start with an a, they take the masculine article el to avoid the combination of the two same vowels (i.e. Spanish speakers say el alma instead of la alma). Still, the word remains being feminine.[2]

3. Many words have completely different meanings depending on what syllable is stressed. For example, la mamá (stressed on the second syllable: the mother), la mama (stressed on the first syllable: the breast).

4. Spanish has two different verbs that mean "to be" in English: ser and estar. The first one is for permanent states (such as personality features of a person; Yo soy alto [I am tall]) and the second one is for temporary states (such as the location of something; Yo estoy en casa [I am at home]).

5. Even though nouns ending in -o are usually masculine, la mano is a feminine word.

6. Many nouns are spelled the same but change meanings if they're used with a different grammatical gender. For example, el cometa (the comet) and la cometa (the kite); el cura (the Catholic priest) and la cura (the cure); el pendiente (the earring) and la pendiente (the slope).[3]

7. Different from English, Spanish has a relatively free word order, and variations of the Subject-Verb-Object order occur much more often than in English. For example, the sentence "Juan wrote a book" can be said like "Juan escribió el libro," "El libro escribió Juan," "Escribió Juan el libro," and even "Juan el libro escribió," or "El libro, Juan escribió" for some literary effect.[4]

8. In most parts of the Spanish-speaking world, there's a familiar-informal 2nd person singular pronoun (usually tú) and a formal 2nd person singular pronoun for unknown, older, or important people (usted).

9. In the Rioplatense variety, the pronoun tú is never used; vos is used instead as the informal-familiar 2nd person singular. In some other countries, such as Ecuador, both tú and vos coexist, but the second one has a social connotation and is considered a highly uneducated (and even lowly) way of addressing others.[5]

10. Exclamations and questions in Spanish need to begin with an "opening" exclamation mark (¡) or question mark (¿). These punctuation marks do not exist in other languages, except some minority languages in Spain.

11. Considering the three moods (Indicative, Subjunctive, and Imperative), there are 17 tenses in Spanish.[6]

12. Spanish has two different versions of the imperfect subjunctive that coexist in modern Spanish (Pretérito Imperfecto del subjuntivo), one with -ra endings and one with -se. Most native speakers use either form interchangeably. For instance, the words amara or amase ([if I] loved).

Spanish Pronunciation

1. Spanish is a very phonetic language. If you know how a word is spelled, you can surely know how it's pronounced.

2. If you know how a word is pronounced, you cannot be sure of how it's spelled.

3. Letters b and v sound the same in Standard Modern Spanish (this simplification took place between the 15th and 17th century). Between vowel sounds, they're pronounced like a soft b, in which the lips don't touch. This last sound doesn't exist in English.[7]

4. Until the early 18th century, the letter x was used to represent the x sound, like the Scottish word "loch." After that, it was replaced with the letter j to represent the same sound. For example, the word caja (box) used to be spelled like caxa.[8]

5. The letter c, when it appears before the letters e and i, is pronounced differently by speakers in Latin America and Spain. The former pronounce it like an s, whereas the latter pronounce it like th in "the."

6. There are plenty of homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently) in Spanish that cause native speakers difficulties in learning how to write. Popular examples are hacia (towards) and Asia (Asia), and hola (hello) and ola (wave).

7. Even though the letters y and ll sound slightly different in most parts of Spain and Latin America, in Rioplatense Spanish, the variety spoken in the most populated areas of Argentina and Uruguay sound like "sh" in English. For example, baya (berry) and valla (fence) sound like bah-shah.

8. Despite being one of the most common words in the language, the word yo (I) can be pronounced in at least four different ways depending on the location of the speaker.

9. The letter y can behave as a consonant at the beginning of syllables (onset), or as a vowel at the ending of syllables (nucleus). For example, yo (y is a consonant), hoy (y has a vowel sound).[9]

Spanish Vocabulary

1. There are words in Spanish that cannot be translated in one word in English. An example is empalagarse (to feel sick because of too much sweetness in food, but also figuratively, as in romantic situations).[10]

2. Another word that cannot be translated in one word is sobremesa (after-dinner conversation).[11]

3. Around 8% of Spanish vocabulary is of Arabic origin.[12] Within numerous expressions of casual Spanish conversation, there often exists a strong likeness to Arabic expression. Probably most well-known is the interjection ¡Ojalá!, which is derived from the phrase law šá lláh, meaning "if Allah wills [it]."[13]

4. There are 30,500 words that contain all of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u).[14]

5. New verbs can be easily created by adding the suffix -ear at the end of the words. This is how modern technology-related words have been invented from English words; for example, escanear (to scan)[15] and tuitear (to send tweets).[16]

6. A very common phrase in Spanish that's literally translated into "holding someone's hair" (tomarle el pelo a alguien) means to mock someone with false compliments or promises.[17]

7. In Argentina, there's a group of slang words called vesre. They come from the Spanish word for "reverse" (revés) after moving around a few letters. Just as the word vesre, other words are made by switching around letters. These words are now so common in Argentina that they may be used more than the "real" word. For example, garpar (Standard Spanish: pagar, English: to pay) or toga (Standard Spanish: gato, English: cat).[18]

8. Many English words have been adapted to Spanish in the 20th century and have become everyday vocabulary. For instance, fútbol (football), suéter (sweater), pulover (pullover), and overol (overall).[19]

9. There are two phrases in Spanish that can be translated to "I love you": Te amo and te quiero. The first one is said between lovers or closely-related family members. The second one is mostly friendly and typically not romantic.

10. There isn't a verb in Spanish that can be literally translated to "like." Me gusta la pizza can be literally translated to the approximation: "The pizza is pleasing to me."

11. English and Spanish share plenty of similarly-written words that don't mean the same. They're called "false friends" and learners of Spanish should be aware of them to avoid difficulties. For example, embarazada means "pregnant" in English and not "embarrassed."

The Language of Spain - Culture and History

1. Spanish is the 2nd most-spoken language as mother tongue. The number of speakers of Spanish as a first language is almost 399 million.[20] The language with the highest number of native speakers is Chinese with 1.2 billion people.[21]

2. Spanish is the 3rd most-used language on the Internet, with 256.8 million users.[22]

3. The use of Spanish on the Internet has grown 1,312.4% from 2000 to 2015.[23]

4. Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.[24]

5. Spanish is the official language in 22 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Nicaragua, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.[25]

6. Spanish is expected to be the first language of 50% of the population of the United States within 50 years.[26]

7. There's a Spanish-based creole language spoken in the Philippines called Chabacano (poor taste, vulgar). It's the sole and most extensive Spanish-based creole language that still exists in Asia or Oceania.[27]

8. Based on estimates from Census data, the Hispanic population in the US will grow to 132.8 million in 2050.

9. People who speak Spanish may call it español (meaning: it comes from Spain), or castellano (meaning: it comes from Castilla, Spain), and many people use both words interchangeably.[29]

10. In 1492, the same year when Columbus arrived in America, the first grammar of Spanish was published by Elio Antonio de Nebrija.[30]

11. Spanish was the major diplomatic language until the 18th century.[31]

12. In 1713, the Real Academia Española was founded. It established authoritative criteria for the sanctioning of neologisms (newly coined words) and the incorporation of international words. Spanish grammar was formalized during this period.[32]

13. In present-day Spanish, September may be spelled septiembre or setiembre. However, the latter is considered a vulgar or informal version of the earlier one because of the dropping of sounds. Contrary to popular belief, the word setiembre is the "originally Spanish" word, since until the 17th century there was no agreement in spelling and the "p" was not pronounced.[33]

14. Some words that begin with "f" in other Romance languages, begin with "h" in Spanish. This makes such difference a unique development for the Spanish language. For example, ferrum (Latin: iron) and hierro (Spanish: iron); falar (Portuguese: to speak) and hablar (Spanish: to speak); figlio and fumo (Italian: son and smoke) and hijo and humo (Spanish: son and smoke).[34]

15. The letter ñ is the only Spanish letter of Spanish origins.[35]

16. Beginning in about the 12th century, Spanish scribes (whose job it was to copy documents by hand) used the tilde placed over letters to indicate that a letter was doubled. This resulted in the Latin word annus to be spelled año in Spanish.[36]

17. The first written records in Spanish are the Glosas Emilianenses and they date back to 964 A.C.[37]

18. The first Literary piece that was fully written in Spanish was "El Cantar de Mio Cid," which dates back to the 13th century and whose author is unknown.[38]

Sources

[1] http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=persona
[2] http://www.spanishgrammargenius.com/why_do_i_use_masculine_article_with_feminine_word.htm
[3] http://spanish.about.com/od/nouns/a/double_gendered.htm
[4] http://spanish.about.com/od/sentencestructure/a/word-order-in-spanish.htm
[5] http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86107/Ennis.pdf
[6] http://www.rae.es/diccionario-panhispanico-de-dudas/apendices/modelos-de-conjugacion-verbal
[7] Lapesa, R. (1981). Historia de la lengua española (9th ed.). Madrid: Gredos. pp. 422. [8] Lapesa, R. (1981). Historia de la lengua española (9th ed.). Madrid: Gredos. pp. 423. [9] http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonology/syllable/syll_structure.html
[10] http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=empalagar
[11] http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=sobremesa
[12] http://people.math.sc.edu/rorabaug/docs/ArabicInfluence.pdf
[13] http://people.math.sc.edu/rorabaug/docs/ArabicInfluence.pdf
[14] http://www.solosequenosenada.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/palabras_con_todas_las_vocales_sin_qu_ni_gu.txt
[15] http://dle.rae.es/?id=G9JTupB
[16] http://dle.rae.es/?id=asr6h3K
[17] http://lema.rae.es/drae/srv/search?id=9sxZRrtuiDXX2EHANeeY
[18] http://www.speakinglatino.com/argentine-slang-in-reverse-vesre/
[19] Lapesa, R. (1981). Historia de la lengua española (9th ed.). Madrid: Gredos. pp. 458. [20] http://www.ethnologue.com/language/spa
[21] http://www.ethnologue.com/language/zho
[22] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
[23] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
[24] http://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/official-languages/
[25] http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/countries_by_languages.htm
[26] http://artsandscience.usask.ca/languages/languages/spanish/
[27] https://www.academia.edu/5922616/Chabacano_The_Case_of_Philippine_Creole_Spanish_in_Cavite
[28] http://www.census.gov/data/tables/2013/demo/2009-2013-lang-tables.html
[29] http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=castellano
[30] http://www.optimnem.co.uk/learning/spanish/language-history.php
[31] http://www.optimnem.co.uk/learning/spanish/language-history.php
[32] http://www.optimnem.co.uk/learning/spanish/language-history.php
[33] Lapesa, R. (1981). Historia de la lengua española (9th ed.). Madrid: Gredos. pp. 390. [34] http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/letchfoa/comparison/comparison2
[35] http://spanish.about.com/cs/historyofspanish/f/tilde_origins.htm
[36] http://spanish.about.com/cs/historyofspanish/f/tilde_origins.htm
[37] http://www.mecd.gob.es/dctm/ministerio/educacion/actividad-internacional/consejerias/reino-unido/tecla/2005/mayo/20-05-05b.pdf?documentId=0901e72b80b7eb9c
[38] http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/cantar_de_mio_cid/

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50 Fascinating Facts About the Spanish Language [Infographic]

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Calling all linguaphiles, trivia buffs, students, teachers, and world travelers - you probably already know that a country's language carries many clues about its history, culture, and values. Understanding the intricacies can often make it easier to learn a language, also, since you'll likely recognize patterns, or how certain language relate to each other.

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A. Carlos Fuentes
B. Miguel de Cervantes
C. Alonso Quijano

D. Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda

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En esta página, aprendemos todo sobre la deixis y cómo estas frases se ajustan a nuestra gramática. La mayoría de los lingüistas están de acuerdo en que estas frases combinan funciones indexadas con información simbólica, de varios tipos. Un primer paso para analizar la deixis en cualquier idioma es, por lo tanto, notar la existencia de expresiones contrastantes de la misma categoría, como en inglés the, this, that, these y these.

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

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PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LINGUISTICS (oxfordre.com/linguistics). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 20 April 2020

Summary and Keywords

Deictic expressions, like English 'this, that, here, and there' occur in all known human languages. They are typically used to individuate objects in the immediate context in which they are uttered, by pointing at them so as to direct attention to them. The object, or demonstratum is singled out as a focus, and a successful act of deictic reference is one that results in the Speaker (Spr) and Addressee (Adr) attending to the same referential object. Thus,

(1)

A:Oh, there'sthat guy again (pointing)B:Oh yeah, now I see him (fixing gaze on the guy)

(2)

A:I'll have that one over there (pointing to a dessert on a tray)B:This? (touching pastry with tongs)A:yeah, that looks greatB:Here ya' go (handing pastry to customer)

In an exchange like (1), A's utterance spotlights the individual guy, directing B's attention to him, and B's response (both verbal and ocular) displays that he has recognized him. In (2) A's utterance individuates one pastry among several, B's response makes sure he's attending to the right one, A reconfirms and B completes by presenting the pastry to him. If we compare the two examples, it is clear that the underscored deictics can pick out or present individuals without describing them. In a similar way, "I, you, he/she, we, now, (back) then," and their analogues are all used to pick out individuals (persons, objects, or time frames), apparently without describing them. As a corollary of this semantic paucity, individual deictics vary extremely widely in the kinds of object they may properly denote: 'here' can denote anything from the tip of your nose to planet Earth, and 'this' can denote anything from a pastry to an upcoming day (this Tuesday). Under the same circumstance, 'this' and 'that' can refer appropriately to the same object, depending upon who is speaking, as in (2). How can forms that are so abstract and variable over contexts be so specific and rigid in a given context? On what parameters do deictics and deictic systems in human languages vary, and how do they relate to grammar and semantics more generally?

Keywords: indexicality, demonstratives, pronouns, anaphora, deictic typology, interaction, pragmatics, space, perception, common ground

1. Deixis and the Grammar

There is a large literature on deixis in several fields. Some linguists and philosophers have called such expressions "indexicals" (Benveniste, ; Eco et al., ; Husserl, ; Morris, ; Peirce, cf. Searle, ). Others call the same class of expressions "shifters" (Jakobson, ; Jespersen, ; Silverstein ), and in this essay we will call them all "deictics" (Fillmore, ; Hanks, , ). Each of these descriptive terms points analysis in a different direction.

'Indexicals' are defined in terms of individuation of a demonstratum, without description, as suggested above (Bar Hillel, ; cf. Kaplan, ; Nunberg, ; Searle, , p. 80). This approach is less prominent in the descriptive linguistic literature, where close analysis of individual 'deictic' or 'demonstrative' systems, or cross-language comparison of systems, reveals many conventionalized features. For the empirically committed linguist, actual deictic forms and arrays always combine sheer indexical functions with symbolic information, of several sorts.

Deictics (including demonstratives and pronouns) are distinguished by grammatical category as in N or ADV (of space, time, manner), and this marking provides crucial information about how the demonstratum is integrated into the phrase, clause, or sentence in which it occurs. Is it a place, path, actor, an object, a way of doing something, or a time frame? In languages that mark case, gender, number, concord, and so forth, grammatical category information leads to a whole array of other morphosyntactic marking, most of which adds more specific information about the referent. This is all the more true in deictics that are arrayed in closed class paradigms, which implies that they share certain features but are distinguished by others.

A first step in analyzing deixis in any language is therefore to note the existence of contrasting expressions of the same category, as in English the, this, that, these, those, (this here, that there) and their Hausa analogs, as shown in Table :

Table 1. Hausa deictics.

In some languages, like French, such series are transparently composed of combinations of a small set of morphemes, as in ici, là, voi-ci, voi-là, ce-ci, ce-la, ces, ceux-ci, ceux-là, celle-ci, celle-là, etc. Yucatec Maya is another clear illustration:

Table 2. Yucatec deictics (partial).

This kind of proportionality or analogical formation of lexemes in sets is so strong that some scholars have proposed to define deictics by paraphrasing them in terms of one another, as in "this is the one here now," "here is the place of I now," "there is the place of you or he" (Fillmore, ; Frei, ; Kurylowicz, ; Lyons, ; compare Russell, ; Reichenbach, ). Suggestive evidence for such a claim might be the fact that in many languages, forms in one category are transparently derived from those in another, as in Quechua ( kay 'this' > kay-pi 'here,' chay 'that [medial]' > chay-pi 'there,' haqay 'that [dist]' > haqay-pi 'there [dist]' (Calvo Perez, ; Lasater, ). Similarly, Mandarin demonstratives are monomorphemic, whereas spatial adverbs are derived by suffixation: zhè 'this, high accessibility' > zhèr, zhèli 'here,' nà 'that, low accessibility' > nàr, nàli 'there' (Tang, ). Temporal deictics may be derived from spatial ones, as in Yucatec tol-akhéak-o' 'back then [remote past]' < tol-o' 'out there [remote]', or from non-deictic lexemes (cf. 'today,' 'yesterday,' aujourd'hui, Maya behé'ela'e' 'today (lit. 'road.here.it.is')).

In highly compositional languages such as Nungubuyu (Heath, ), Santali (Zide, ) and Malagasy (Anderson & Keenan, ), deictic words may be composed of five or more morphemes. Heath () reports that in Nungubuyu, four basic roots distinguish Proximal, Accessible (to Adr), Distal and Anaphoric in both demonstrative and adverbial categories, with the adverbs derived from the nominals by suffixation. These are subdivided into + ≠ ∅ Concrete (precise vs. vague reference), + ≠ ∅ Kinetic (trajectory vs. location), + ≠ − Centric (where +Centric is subdivided into Centripetal ≠ Centrifugal, and −Centric is used for transverse relative to the Spr's field of vision). The nominal forms are further subdivided by + ≠ ∅ Absolute (which Heath glosses as 'definiteness'), gender (masc, fem), number (sg, dual, pl) for human referents, and an additional five noun classes for non-humans. Among the most elaborate systems reported in the literature is Inuktitut (Denny, , pp. 371-372). In this language, there are twelve deictic roots, distinguishing 'Out of field' ≠ 'In-field' and within In-field, Away (non-prox) ≠ At (prox). In-field Away is then split into three values: Bounded (Exterior ≠ Interior) ≠ Vertical (Inferior ≠ Superior) ≠ Horizontal. The In-field categories are further divided by a binary opposition between Restricted (equidimensional, punctual) ≠ Extended (elongate, mobile, regional). Further modifications (by inflection or derivation) yield over six hundred and eighty-five deictic words.

In general, the more compositional a deictic paradigm, the more transparent are the functional distinctions between forms, and the greater the likelihood that given morphemes or distinctions recur across categories, resulting in a high degree of proportionality.

Cross-cutting these contrasts is one between deictics that can be lexically expanded, as in "this, this man, this man who you saw." In this series, simple this is "pronominal" and the other two phrases are adnominal uses of the demonstrative. In the adnominal cases, the lexical expansion provides descriptive information about the demonstratum, in a sense filling in the semantics to complement the leaner indexical. In many of the world's languages, these two functions correspond to distinctive demonstrative or adverbial forms, as in Mulau, a Daic language, and Japanese (Diessel, , p. 59). In twenty-four of the eighty-five languages Diessel (, p. 58) sampled, pronominal and adnominal usages are marked by different categories. In Turkish and Lezgian, the same deictic roots are used in both functions, but the pronominal forms inflect for case, whereas the adnominal ones do not.

All of these grammatical facts are relevant to the claims that referential deixis forms a subsystem within the grammars of human languages and that when inflected, derived, or lexically expanded, deictics convey a great deal of information, much of which is directly relevant to identifying the demonstratum. Bare roots are predictably less rich in information than stems, phrases, or constructions.

Deictics in many languages may be combined into constructions in which distinct, coreferential, or mutually reinforcing forms co-occur. This is illustrated by (non-standard) English 'this here book,' and (standard) Yucatec leti' ela' [the.one this] = 'this very one' and leti' e hé'ela' < 'the one the here.it.is' = 'this here one.' In the spatial series in Maya, there is a distinction between two proximal forms, the one Punctate ( té'ela' 'right here/there') and the other Regional waye' 'here' [region including me now]. For simple locative deixis, the two forms are opposed, but there is a commonly used construction in which they are combined: té'e waya' < 'right.there here' = 'right there' [point within region of 'here']. In one class of constructions, including the ones just cited, two or more deictics corefer to the same object, but each deictic contributes its own distinctive information.

In other cases, one and the same deictic root or word is duplicated for added emphasis. Consider the following examples, from Maya, in which the directive deictic hé'el=o' 'there it is' (look!) occurs in four different shapes, in which both parts of the construction may be duplicated. In the bottom five phrases, the standard negative marker is added. No deictic derived from the root hé' e may be semantically negated; to do so would be equivalent to saying "There it isn't" (look!). Instead, by adding the negative to the directive, the result is a more emphatic directive. Notice in the examples, that the longer and heavier the construction, the more pragmatic effects arise. Whether one derives these effects from inferences or some other mechanism, there is clear iconicity in the relation between the increasingly elaborate marking of the form and the increasingly elaborate effect. Parentheses enclose rough, purely heuristic glosses of the conveyed pragmatic effect.

It is standard in the literature to distinguish between endophoric and exophoric deixis. In exophoric usage, the deictic (token) denotes an object in the extralinguistic context, as in "here, have a sip" (extending beverage to addressee). By contrast, in endophoric usage, the deictic refers to an object of discourse (often nowhere materially present on scene). Anaphoric usage of a deictic is an example of this, as in "So you went to Boston, did you like it there?" Notice in this case that there is interpreted as coreferential with Boston, and if one switches the city to Chicago, the reference of the deictic shifts with it. The distinction between endo- and exophoric uses can be difficult to draw, and there are arguably blended cases, yet there are clear cases where different deictic categories have different valences. In Maya spatial deictics there are five (bimorphemic) stems, of which waye' 'here' [region which includes me now] is invariantly exophoric, and tí'i 'there' [where we said] is invariantly endophoric. The interest of this distinction, beyond the fact that languages encode it, is that endophoric usage engages the memory more centrally, whereas exophoric engages the senses. The referent is cognitively accessible, but not perceptually accessible. Moreover, the cognitive access in question must be shared by the parties. It is "common ground," whereas not all exophoric deixis picks out objects already given to both participants.

The linguistic expression of deixis extends far beyond these initial distinctions. Taken together however, they make up what can be called the grammatical skeleton of deixis in any language: grammatical category features, paradigmatic oppositions among roots and stems, inflection, derivation, proportionality across categories, pro-X vs. ad-X structures, the broad issue of constructions in which multiple coreferential forms combine and the interaction between endophoric and exophoric. Viewed in this context, natural language deixis is obviously not the same as philosophically defined indexicality: deixis blends indexicality with a hefty dose of other information about the referent, the search domain and the grammatical role it plays in the sentence.

2. Functional Structure of Deixis

Most of the linguistic literature on deixis follows Buhler () in distinguishing three parts in the elementary speech event: the Speaker, the Addressee, and the Object talked about. In Figure , the Spr-Adr relation consists of the reciprocal orientation of the two parties and the contact established between them, such as reciprocal gaze in face-to-face interaction. This relation may be marked by a high degree of common ground and mutual knowledge, or by relevant asymmetries (of perceptual field, social status, knowledge of the matter at hand, rights and responsibilities, and so forth). The regular alternation of I, you, we, and (s)he in dialogue is a handy indicator of the reciprocal Spr-Adr relation.

The Spr-Obj relation is established by the act of deictic reference itself, in which the Obj is individuated by the Spr's deictic act. The Spr may already have an established relation to the Obj; she may own it, have it in her hand, be close to it, or be looking at it. In traditional egocentric approaches to deixis, this Spr-to-Obj accessibility relation is the defining one. Yet in a successful, fully consummated deictic exchange, the Adr must also establish a relation to the Obj. At the completion of the utterance, if not before, the parties must attend to the same Obj, achieving what Clark, Schreuder, and Buttrick () have called joint attention focus. For this reason, deictic usage is highly sensitive to the access that both parties have to the Obj. Asymmetries in any of the Spr-Adr, Spr-Obj or Adr-Obj relations can affect a Spr's choice of deictics.

There is widespread agreement in studies of natural language deixis that indexicality designates the context dependency between utterances and speech contexts, and that deictics are a special kind of indexical, used to make reference to single objects or groups of objects in relation to the context of utterance. We can schematize this as in Figure , where the 'Indexical ground' is the contextual zero-point, or pivot relative to which the deictic points to the focal object.

One of the best known features of deictics is that they shift in reported speech, so that "I like it here" (said in context 1) becomes "Bill said he liked it there" (said in Context 2). Note that Person, Tense and Locative deictics all shift in reported speech (hence the term "shifter" coined by Jesperson and adopted by Jakobson). Using Figure as a guide, reported use is a transposition of the original indexical ground from an earlier Context 1 to the subsequent Context 2 in which it is reported. By contrast, when speech includes direct quotation, the same relational structure is in play, but in an inverse manner: the original linguistic forms are reproduced verbatim in the quotation, but their reference is displaced away from the quoting context. Therefore, if Ben quotes Sebastian saying "I'll be here tomorrow," then the 'I', 'here' and tomorrow' denote Sebastian (not Ben), the time and place of Sebastian's utterance (Context 1, not context 2 of Ben's utterance). The alternation of participants in face-to-face interaction, as each party is Spr, then Adr, then Spr, etc., displays the same transposition of indexical ground. In dialogue and reported speech, the relational values of 'I', 'you, 'this,' and 'that' do not vary systematically according to who is speaking; it is the indexical ground that alternates (Hanks, ).

This three-way distinction raises two key questions. First, what kinds of relational features are encoded in deictic types? The standard view holds that relative contiguity (this = proximal, that = non-proximal, and so forth) is fundamental, and other pragmatic effects are incidental to deixis or derived from contiguity by metaphorical extension (Anderson & Keenan, ) or contextual inference (Levinson, ). For careful assessment of these alternatives, argued with data from Lao, see Enfield (, ). More recent work argues that the basis of deixis is not spatial contiguity, but rather accessibility. What matters is not where the object is, but how the participants have or gain mutual access to it (Hanks, , ; Himmelmann, ; Janssen, , ; Leonard, ; Mondana, ). Spatial contiguity can support accessibility, but so can perception (via any of the senses), prior talk and memory, salience (cognitive or perceptual), evaluative stance, relative familiarity with the object, and in some cases ownership of the object by a participant.

The second major question bears on how one defines the indexical ground. As noted, a dominant tradition in the analysis of deixis assumes that the zero-point, or ground is Spr, as in "'here' is a place close to me." (compare Evans, , Chapter 6; Gale, ; cf. Russell's description of "egocentric particulars," 1940). Most traditional grammars and typologies make the same assumption (e.g., Anderson & Keenan, ), and Benveniste's (, ) anchoring of indexical reference in subjectivity makes the same move (compare Lyons, , p. 121). Presumably, the rationale is that, among the multiple factors in any context, the Spr has a special centrality. But when describing actual deictic practice, it is essential to take into account the other two relations as well: Spr-Adr and Adr-Obj (Hanks, , , ). Asymmetries between participants, common ground (Clark & Marshall, ; Clark, Schreuder, & Buttrick, ; Enfield, ), and audience design have a strong impact on the use and understanding of deictic tokens. The same interactive factors may be partially conventionalized in the semantics of deictic types, as displayed in Tables -.

Table 3. Distinctive origos for deixis.

Table 6. Demonstratives in Japanese (Kuno, , p. 27).

3. Spatial Access to the Deictic Object

Work done at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen has demonstrated significant complexity in the spatial domain of deixis, and a growing literature on deictic typology reinforces that impression that even spatial deixis is much more subtle than simple contiguity. Table shows some of the attested distinctions, summarized by Diessel ().

Table 7. Spatial relations: Object to origo (cf. Diessel, , p. 51).

In systems apparently based on relative proximity, the 'middle' term(s) are the first point of contention: Does an erstwhile 'middle distance' deictic shift its Origo (the reference point on which deictic relationships are based) from Spr to Adr (mid = close to Adr, or mid-range from Spr)? Does it introduce some other parameter (like perceptibility of the Obj)? Ignoring the addition of a preposition, think of English here, there, over there as three degrees of distance. Is simple ' there ' more focally mid-range from Spr, or is it better analyzed as Prox to Adr (who might define the Origo for mid-range)?

In systems that include a distinction between static Obj and mobile Obj, a new set of distinctions becomes relevant: is " that one " approaching us, fleeing from us, or traversing our field (Centripedal, Centrifugal, Transverse)? Moreover, if the Obj is static, is it above us or below us? This is the Elevation parameter in Table . Finally, in an ecology with salient topographic features, does one or another feature characterize the referent especially well? Features of the natural environment, like rises in the land, or coastlines, are sometimes conventionalized in deictics, although this appears to be rare.

Tables - illustrate a few paradigms reported in the linguistic literature. A glance at the linguistic forms themselves will show that these are paradigmatic sets with parallel formation. Note the presence of three or more degrees of remove from Origo, the shift of the Origo from Spr to Adr (Tables , ), and the combination of verticality, interiority, or visibility with the dimension of relative contiguity. The implication is that a universal vocabulary for describing deictic systems must distinguish these parameters, rather than assimilating them all to contiguity.

Table 9. Ronga three basic terms, with 3rd elaborated.

Table 10. Interiority: Spatial deictics in Yucatec Maya.

The Interiority feature in Maya, Table is meant to capture the fact that waye' '(in) here' always refers to a region inside of which the Spr finds herself. For instance, this room is a waye' for me now; the building, the city, the part of the country are all potential waye', whose regional scope varies. What never varies is that the Spr is within the region denoted at the moment of utterance. From this it follows that a Maya Spr cannot point to a body part and say "it hurts waye'" (since the Spr is not entirely within the body part). Similarly, "let's go waye'" is ill-formed, since, wherever the Spr is, he is already waye'. The correct forms for demonstrating punctual or nearby places deploy té'ela', 'here/there,' usually produced with co-speech pointing.

4. Perceptual Access to the Deictic Object

Perception is obviously critical to our apprehension of space, and directed gaze can embody the turning of cognitive attention, especially when a deictic Object happens to be accessible in the sensory field of interaction. The question is whether the role of perception and attention in deictic practice is part of the language or merely part of the human context in which language is used. Straightforward as it is, this distinction can be subtle in practice, because an object that is accessible to touch is thereby also proximal. One within view may be distal, it may be both audible and out of sight, or audible but also known, or again it may be accessible to smell (like a forest fire) yet of uncertain location, and so forth. How does one decide which of the simultaneous relations is the one foregrounded by the deictic utterance? This kind of multiplicity poses major challenges for the pragmatics of deixis, and it requires a combination of linguistic analysis and participant observation where one can note the lead-up and response as well as the target utterance in its actual deictic field. It also requires metalinguistic discussion with native speakers of utterances and everyday interactions, in order to gauge their standards and expectations (Hanks, ).

At the level of linguistic categories and features, there are many reports in the literature of deictic systems with dedicated perceptual forms, as illustrated in the next set of paradigms. By far the most common perceptual modality for deixis is vision, although touch and hearing play a role. In all cases of which I am aware, it is the perceptual access of the Spr or the access shared by Spr + Adr that is marked, not the Adr's access. Thus, whereas spatial contiguity may be computed relative to Adr, as in the "medial" forms above, perceptual access does not appear to shift Origo in this way (Diessel, , pp. 41-42). One does not use a Visible deictic to denote an Object the Adr can see but the Spr cannot.

Table 12. Perceptual access to referents: Visibility.

In languages like Quileute, Kwakwa'la, and Crow, both Visible and Invisible are marked, whereas in Santali, West Greenlandic, and Ute. It is Invisible that receives a dedicated form. It appears that no language has a special form marking Visible unless it also has one for Invisible. This suggests that visual access is the normal state of affairs, and the use of simple proximal or distal forms in a language with an overt Invisible, pragmatically implies that the object is within sight. Table displays what Diessel (, p. 42) takes to be the most common alignment.

The series of deictics we have called "presentative" in Maya illustrate a provocative blend of directivity and perception-based evidentiality. The forms are shown in Table . Note first that this series is distinct from the spatial deictics and that all four forms are derived from the same root hé'e(l-). When combined with -a' Immed, o' non-Immed or - be' Peripheral sensory, the resulting stems are not merely referring expressions (it is here), but have the full force of directives (here it is, take it!; there it is look!; there it is, listen! or smell it!). Hence I have labeled them Ostensive Evidentials (OSTEVs). By contrast, when the same root is combined with the empty placeholder suffix -e', the result is not even a referring expression, but rather a modal marking Spr certainty without perceptual evidence.

Table 14. Ostensive evidential deictics in Yucatec (Hanks, , ).

The R values conveyed by the OSTEVs are explicitly evidential in that they are centered on qualitatively different kinds of perceptual access to referents (Chafe & Nichols, ; Dendale & Tasmowski, ; Guentchéva, ; Hanks, ). The category embodies a scale of evidence, from tactual through peripheral sensory, and at the lowest end, certainty without current evidence. It is tempting, in light of typology, to analyze hé'ebe' as marking simply that the Object is not within sight of the Spr, hence Invisible as in the languages in Table . Unfortunately, this will not suffice because the form marks both Invisible and Perceptible. A couple of examples from my fieldwork will illustrate ordinary usage of these forms. Margot is an adult bilingual mother of four, whose first language was Maya. Pilar and Elena are co-resident sisters-in-law, and both are monolingual Maya speakers. Margot was in the yard with a hose, watering plants, when I come out of house with filthy hands raised needing to wash them. She held out the hose for me to rinse my hands, saying:

Pilar was in front of her kitchen. and Elena was across the yard doing laundry. At the time, Chiki, Elena's child, was on the far side of Elena's house, invisible to Pilar but in clear sight of Elena. Her utterance invites Pilar to come and see for herself.

It was evening, and I was sitting with Elena in her kitchen, by the cooking fire. We heard Pilar patting masa 'corn paste' into tortillas in the next-door kitchen, across the courtyard and out of sight. In the example, Elena remarks that Pilar is making tortillas and just then we hear another slap of her hand.

5. Cognitive Access to the Deictic Object

Deictics in any language are also used under circumstances in which neither spatial location nor sensory access is available to help the Adr zero in on the referent. This is the case, for instance, when a deictic is used endophorically, to corefer with some antecedent expression in the prior discourse. In many languages, including English, the erstwhile distal forms 'that' or there' may be used for anaphoric coreference with a prior NP or locational. In some languages, dedicated forms are specialized in anaphoric deixis. As pointed out earlier, all varieties of endophoric deixis rely on memory, background knowledge or anticipation, rather than spatial location or perceptual access. We will term this dimension "cognitive access." Anaphora is distinctive in that the reference is controlled by sequence: the antecedent is earlier in the discourse and must be retrieved, and there are subtle interactions between the form of an anaphoric expression, the sequential structure of the interaction, and how far back in discourse one needs to look for its antecedent (Hanks, ). This may motivate the fact that the same forms used for anaphora are often used to designate the path one has traversed (I came that way, from there) as opposed to the prospective forward path (I'm heading this way, over here). Table displays the varieties of cognitive access to the deictic referent.

Table 15. Cognitive access to object.

Closely related to anaphora is the use of deixis in direct reference to a prior utterance. Here there is no coreference between the deictic and the antecedent, but a simple direct reference to the antecedent itself.

Such reference to discourse is very common in response position, and in closing routines in talk in interaction (so there you have it, that's that, that's what I wanted to tell you). In Maya, the Visible OSTEV hé'elo' 'there it is (look!) is routinely used to bring an episode or interaction to a close, or mark that a conclusion has been reached. By contrast, lelo' b'èey 'that's how it is,' leti' 'the one' and letielo' 'that's the one' are all used in response position to assent with a prior statement without bringing the episode to a close.

A third variety of cognitive access is what some linguists call pragmatically controlled anaphora. The term is unfortunate because pragmatically controlled reference is not necessarily governed by discourse sequence, as is anaphora proper. Instead, in what Schegloff has dubbed "Recognitional" usage, the Spr assumes that the Adr will be able to identify the referent without further description or gestures. What underlies the Adr's access is background knowledge, hence memory, but not short-term memory of an antecedent in discourse. Consider two illustrations attested in Maya.

Father arrives home from travel and notices that one of his four children is not around, and so he asks his spouse:

The conveyed meaning of this utterance was to ask where the child in question was, that is, neither spatial nor perceptual access was available to either himself or his spouse. Rather, he knew that she would recognize which of the four children he was asking about. Similarly, it is routine in Maya to refer to one's spouse as leti' 'the one,' without any recent antecedent, because although this form fails to mark gender or any other distinguishing feature of the referent, one's spouse is, as it were, cognitively accessible at all times.

In (10), I have just asked Margot to make me a couple of hammocks that I will purchase and give as gifts. She asks me whether I want them to turn out like the ones I had already bought from her in the past.

Anaphora, reference to discourse and recognitional deixis are varieties of cognitive access that rely on memory and common ground and allow speakers to refer to Objects nowhere accessible in the spatial or perceptual fields of interaction. Other uses rely more on relative salience, attention focus or the imagination. These are the "forward looking" counterparts of the varieties of endophora that depend upon prior experience. For instance, in (11), (l)e máak a' 'this guy' refers to an individual unknown to the Adr and nowhere on scene. The use of the Immediate demonstrative lela' 'this' indexes high focus, prospective deixis to an individual who is not present, but who will be close at hand once the Spr gets his hands on him.

The parameter labeled Resolution indicates the relative precision or lack of precision in the deictic reference, as in the English constructions "it's over there (somewhere)" (vague, regional) vs. "it's right there" (precise, punctual). Once again, there are languages in which this distinction is categorized in the deictic types, independent of relative distance, yielding arrays of opposed forms. Tables and show two such languages.

Table 17. Crow: Resolution at ±3 degrees of remove (Graczyk, ).

The role of Cognitive Access in deictic practice is broader than these examples suggest. Arguably, all deictic reference, whether spatial, perceptual, retrospective, or prospective, depends upon the cognitive process of orienting the interactants' attention on the object. Part of this is the parameter Resolution, which narrows or broadens the scope of attention focus (cf. floodlight vs. laser pointer). But in ordinary interaction, one can make proper deictic reference to an object that is nowhere physically present in utterance space or the perceptual field. Instead, it may be cognitively present only in mental space. It is erroneous to rule out such uses as metaphorical extensions from spatial contiguity, as in traditional accounts, because languages may intersect space with cognitive access. This is evidence that the parameters are independent. Yet there are also regular patterns whereby forms that ordinarily rely on spatial or perceptual accessibility are deployed for sheerly cognitive access. These can be summarized in the simple tendency that medial or distal deictics are used for retrospection (anaphora, memory), while Immediate or proximal forms are used for prospection (cataphora, anticipation).

In Yucatec Maya, each of the grammatical categories of deixis has one (and only one) form that is dedicated to cognitive access simplicter. In the spatial series, the form is tí'i' 'there (endophoric),' which is used to refer to a place just mentioned (hence anaphoric) or known from background knowledge (hence recognitional). Tí'i' indicates nothing about the location of the referent, other than that it is known. In the nominal series, leti' 'the one' picks a known individual or object irrespective of spatial or perceptual accessibility, e.g., one's spouse. It is opposed to lela' 'this' and lelo' 'that,' both of which prototypically convey spatio-perceptually relevant information. In the OSTEV series, the assurative modal hé'ele' indexes an epistemic stance of certainty, itself based on prior experience or some other cognitive warrant. It has none of the directivity, singularity of reference, or perceptual values of the other OSTEVs. (12) is a reassuring prediction, and (13) an experience-based generalization. (14) illustrates one speaker's gloss of the import of the form.

In the manner adverbial series, bey 'thus, like so' lacks the concreteness of beya' 'like this' (showing) and beyo' 'like that' (reference to discourse or to a state of affairs known by both parties). Rather, as a one-word utterance, it expresses what an English speaker might express by "Yeah," "got it," or "Right." As a common "backchannel device," simple " bey " conveys that the Adr is paying attention and understanding, not necessarily agreeing with the Spr.

6. Interactive Shifts in Deictic Practice

The different kinds of access outlined above are integral to deictic practice, in which cognitive, spatial, and perceptual access to objects of reference undergird interactants' ability to accomplish joint attention. They all contribute to the coordination of the interactants and their ability to pick out the same objects, that is, to agree on what they are talking about. Even when an object is available for the senses, it is the focusing of attention on that object that the deictic utterance accomplishes, whether it is already attended to or newly projected as a focus. This is especially evident in interactional sequences in which the parties have asymmetric access to the Object, and the Adr must figure out what or where the Spr is pointing to. The final example is an exchange I participated in and recorded, in Maya. In the example, Florencio (nickname Lol) and Fidelia, husband and wife, are talking with me about relations between nuclear families in the multi-family homesteads in which Maya people often live. Residence is patrilocal and the sons and their wives coreside in the larger home of the sons' father. Sisters-in-law are ranked in authority according to the birth order and prestige of their husbands. Each nuclear family pays for its own food, and each wife cooks at her own hearth. On the day in question, Margot, the senior wife and mother of four, had gone to the city, and I wondered who had prepared the dinner and where it was cooked. Lol explained that his wife Fidelia had prepared it, at her own hearth. Note that he refers to her with simple leti' 'the one," as expected, and that he refers laconically to her hearth as té'elo' 'there.' The locative deictic functions spatially to denote the place where she cooked, but Florencio simultaneously assumes that I will recognize where he means without further clues. He presumes both spatial and cognitive access. I was initially confused because the two women's hearths were side-by side and Fidelia's was the closer one to us, although we could not see it from where we were seated, inside her house. Why had Lol construed her hearth as té'elo' (non-Immediate) rather than té'ela' (Immediate) in light of the actual contiguity relations?

My query displays my lack of recognition, and in response, Lol reformulates the spatial deictic, upgrading the non-Immed recognitional té'elo' to the Immed, punctual directive construction té' way beya', which can be roughly glossed 'right there (inside our) here like this (gesturing)'. This simple exchange demonstrates the co-operation of spatial and recognitional deixis, and the fluency with which Lol shifts the frame of reference from recognitional to a much more precise spatial relation amplified by a visible gesture. It is the asymmetry in our respective knowledge-the lack of common ground-that his utterance rectifies. In the phrasicon of Maya deixis, the two formulations are opposed and they imply different relations between Origo and Object. If the meaning components of deictics were only spatial, it is difficult to see how one and the same referent could be simultaneously 'there' and 'right here' for the same speaker under the same circumstances. But space is only part of the story, and in interaction, the Origo is dynamic, not static. Lol's reformulation of the hearth is coreferential with his earlier deictic, but it construes it in terms of a different relation to us.

The challenge for a pragmatics of deixis is that in interaction, Sprs routinely shift between deictic construals of Objects from one utterance to the next, expanding and contracting the deictic field, transposing the Origo, or activating different modalities of access. This results in conversational sequences in which deictics that are normally opposed to one another are used to demonstrate one and the same Object, but under a different perspective. The study of these processes yields powerful evidence of the relations between semantics and pragmatics, and the functional requisites of deictic practice.

Notes:

( 2.) An Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines.

( 3.) A Chimakuan language spoken in the Northwestern U.S. (Diessel, 1999, p. 41, Table 22).

( 4.) A Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Southwestern China (cited in Diessel, 1999, p. 43, Table 26).

( 5.) A Bantu (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Mozambique.

( 6.) An Austro-Asiatic language spoken in India (Diessel, 1999, p. 42, Table 25).

( 7.) A Uto-Aztecan language spoken in the Southwestern U.S. (Diessel, 1999, p. 42, Table 23).

( 8.) A Niger-Congo language spoken in Cameroon (Diessel, 1999, p. 20, Table 9).

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Deictic expressions, like English 'this, that, here, and there' occur in all known human languages. They are typically used to individuate objects in the immediate context in which they are uttered, by pointing at them so as to direct attention to them.

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Esta presentación es útil para comprender los roles semánticos y cómo se usan en el lenguaje cotidiano. Definen un papel semántico como la relación subyacente entre la persona y el verbo principal. Los roles semánticos no son como las relaciones gramaticales porque son conceptuales. Hay muchos roles que son posibles como agente, beneficiario y causante.

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Este artículo explica la pragmática y qué es exactamente. El autor afirma que describe la conexión entre el lenguaje y la vida humana porque es el estudio de cómo las personas usan el lenguaje. La pragmática es importante para aprender porque ayuda a demostrar las diferencias culturales y sociales dentro de un idioma.

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Language Awareness

* What is Pragmatics?
* Why is Pragmatics important to language learners?
* Pragmatics in the Macmillan English Dictionary
* Types of Pragmatic information
* Language functions or 'speech acts'
* Language and politeness
* Attitudes and feelings
* Vague language
* Further reading

Pragmatics is the study of how people use language. It describes the connection between language and human life. An important feature of language is that the meaning of a sentence is more than a combination of the meaning of the words it contains: to understand fully, we also use information from the situation where the sentence is used. Look at the following example:

[Kate is about to go out of her house]
Kate: Now I've lost my keys. No, I haven't. Here they are. I mustn't forget my keys.

From this we understand that:
1 it is important that Kate takes her keys and
2 she is afraid she might lose them or forget them because on a previous occasion she has forgotten them.

These two ideas do not come from the individual words Kate has spoken. They come from the particular combination of these words with our knowledge of the situation where they are used. Some words show many different pragmatic effects. Forget is one of these, and here we show several contrasting uses of forget. Language users (either speakers or writers) continually make choices of words and phrases and these choices affect how they are understood. Compare the following two ways of telling someone the same thing:

[Jim and Sue are discussing their family finances]
Jim: I think we can forget the idea of a holiday this year.

We understand Jim is telling Sue that they will not have enough money to go on holiday. We also understand that Jim is expressing some emotion about the idea. Either he really wants to go on holiday, or he knows that Sue does. The neutral way of saying the same thing is:

Jim: We won't be going on holiday this year.

This example shows us an important choice: between a neutral way of saying something, and a way that emphasizes, or that expresses a personal point of view or an evaluation.

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All languages have a set of pragmatic conventions about language use. These conventions are social and cultural. So they differ from language to language, from country to country, and from culture to culture. It is important to learn about the pragmatic conventions of English so as to be able to make full use of the words you know and to avoid mistakes.

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The Macmillan English Dictionary gives a large amount of pragmatic information about how, when, and why words are used. All the examples are taken from real texts and conversations. It helps you to use words and phrases correctly.

People use language to do things. For example to:

* get other people to do things (request, order, persuade)
* give information
* express opinions
* express emotions
* make commitments (offer, promise, agree to do something).

Here are some examples from the dictionary:

forget it spoken 2 used for showing that you are annoyed because you think someone's comment or suggestion is completely unreasonable: In the end I said to him, 'Look, forget it - I'm not paying you.' * If you're just going to stand there and criticize, forget it.

This use of forget it is emotional and rather impolite. Compare it with the first meaning of forget it, which is polite, and is often used for refusing an offer from someone else:

'How much do I owe you?' 'Oh, forget it, it's nothing.'

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People also use language to help their social relationships. For example, when you ask someone to do something for you, you usually want to do this politely. Many entries in the dictionary give information about how to use words politely. For example:

sorry to bother you spoken used for politely asking someone to do something for you, especially someone you do not know: Sorry to bother you, but would you mind moving your bag?

Both may and can are used for asking for, giving, and refusing permission, but may is more formal:

You can/may go now. * 'Can I/May I come with you?' 'No, you can't/you may not.'

3 spoken used when making a polite remark or suggestion: may I say/ask/suggest etc May I say a word of thanks to all those who helped to organize the carnival. * May I suggest a better idea?

There is also information about impolite and rude language in the dictionary.

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Politeness is often about taking care of emotions and feelings - your own and other people's. There are many expressions that tell someone else that you are trying to take care of their feelings. Here is an example from the entry for the verb may:

if I may say so used for introducing a personal comment, when you know that the person who you are speaking to may find this offensive: What a very attractive dress, if I may say so!

To make a comment about someone else's clothes, even a positive one, could be impolite, especially if you do not know the person well. If I may say so, in this context, means 'I know I am saying something risky'.

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Words and phrases can give information about people's attitude and feelings, for example:

don't (you) forget it used for telling someone very firmly how they should behave, especially when they have said or done something that you do not approve of: Don't call me 'Jim'. I'm Mr Parker to you, and don't you forget it!

One large area of difficulty for learners is that English has many words and phrases that appear to be neutral, but that in fact carry a negative or positive connotation (this has been called 'semantic prosody'). Here is an example:

Par for the course is used to indicate that something is normal or usual: Delays at airports in the holiday season are par for the course.

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However, it is important to know that par for the course very often shows a negative attitude. For example, in a newspaper report of a football match, the manager is disappointed with the size of the crowd:

Only 10,000 people came to watch on Saturday. The manager said, 'I thought we would have got a good crowd back after our last few results, but this seems to be par for the course lately .'

Notice that the same word can have a positive or a negative meaning, depending on the situation in which it is used. Here is an example:

old-fashioned / ld f ( )nd/ adj no longer modern or fashionable: Blake was carrying an old-fashioned leather briefcase. a. used in a negative way to refer to methods, attitudes, or machines that are no longer useful or suitable in the modern world = OUTDATED: They have very old-fashioned ideas about raising children. b. used in a positive way to refer to nice things from the past that still exist: good old-fashioned home baking

People learn some of their attitudes from their culture, so learners of English need to learn not only the basic meaning of words but also their cultural impact. An example of an attitude that varies from culture to culture is the outward expression of feelings. In some cultures, people express negative emotions such as grief in a very open and public way, while in other cultures people try hard not to show their feelings.

In English, if we say that someone bottles up their feelings, we mean that we think that this is bad. But if we say that someone hides their feelings, we make no evaluative comment. Here is an example that makes the negative connotation obvious:

Research shows that some illnesses are more prevalent in those with a tendency to bottle up their emotions.

Generally, in British culture, people do not express negative emotions such as grief or anger in public.

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Vague expressions allow speakers and writers to give an appropriate amount of information in a particular context. For example, people are vague because they do not have precise information or, sometimes, they are vague because precise information is not needed. We show many vague expressions in the dictionary. Here are just two:

anything ... 3 used with numbers to show that you are not giving exact information, but that any number is possible within the range you mention: A good diamond could cost anything from £10,000 to £300,000. * You may have to wait anything up to six months for an appointment.

The writers here are generalizing and therefore cannot give exact amounts or times.

...or something (like that/of the sort) used for referring to any of a group of things or possibilities without being specific

Ros: When she phoned, I was doing the crossword or something.

Ros wants to focus on the telephone call and what she was doing at the time is not important.

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The classic linguistics text on pragmatics is:
Pragmatics, S. Levinson. (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

An introductory book that contains tasks and exercises is:
Understanding Pragmatics, J. Verschueren. (Arnold, 1999)

For more on the topics described here, see:
Vague Language, J. Channell. (Oxford University Press, 1994)
'Vagueness in Written English', J. Channell. Modern English Teacher 1999, Vol 8, no 4: 26-30.Vol 8, no 4: 26-30.

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Language Awareness * What is Pragmatics? * Why is Pragmatics important to language learners? * Pragmatics in the Macmillan English Dictionary * Types of Pragmatic information * Language functions or 'speech acts' * Language and politeness * Attitudes and feelings * Vague language * Further reading Pragmatics is the study of how people use language.

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Este interesante estudio trata sobre las relaciones semánticas y cómo las personas perciben sus roles. En este experimento, hubo cuarenta sujetos que clasificaron las tarjetas según sus diferencias y similitudes. Los resultados mostraron que los sujetos percibieron cinco familias de relaciones semánticas (contrastes, inclusión de clases, similares, relaciones de casos y totalidades parciales).

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En este artículo, aprendemos sobre el amplio alcance de la sociolingüística. El autor dice que no solo hay una definición, sino que hay algunos términos que incluye la definición principal. Usan tanto la palabra "social" como "lingüística". Un ejemplo de esto es la forma en que una persona dice algo puede depender de la función y el estado del hablante.

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The term "sociolinguistics" began to gain currency about ten years ago. The subsequent decade has seen a great deal of activity. There have been general symposia; symposia on major topics; notable major research efforts; the launching of series of working papers; books of readings, increasingly specific to the field; textbooks; even a series of collected papers of middle-aged men who find themselves senior scholars; and journals.

The present meeting is in a way a culmination of the decade's activity. Where do we stand? How far have we progressed? In some ways, very far. In one fundamental regard, I think, simply to a threshold.

"The energetic activity in sociolinguistics is nourished in important part by the obvious relevance of much of its subject matter, joining other academic fields in which concern for education, children, ethnic relations, and governmental policies find expression."

We are all familiar with the gap that can exist between public concerns and the competence of scientists. The energetic activity in sociolinguistics is nourished in important part by the obvious relevance of much of its subject matter, joining other academic fields in which concern for education, children, ethnic relations, and governmental policies find expression. However, there are scientific as well as practical needs. If relevance to social problems were not recognized, sociolinguistic research would still be needed for the sake of an adequate theory of language. Some of what is done under the rubric of sociolinguistics may be justified only in the sense that something is better than nothing, when need is great. But in the present state of sociolinguistics, I would maintain (1) that the scientific as well as the practical side of linguistics stands in need; (2) that scientific and practical needs converge; and (3) that steps taken during the past decade have brought us to the threshold of an integrated approach to linguistic description. As to (1), witness the current disarray with regard to arguments in syntax and semantics and to the place of semantics, intonation, and even phonology and lexicon in a model of grammar itself, as issues of empirical adequacy and validity are pressed against the dominant "intuitionist" approach-and as other, contextually oriented traditions of work are gradually reinvented or grudgingly rediscovered. As to (2), note that findings about the organization of variation and the structure of speech acts-both are central to linguistic theory-contribute to the scientific basis that successful practice needs. At the same time, facts of practical experience (e.g., the organization of linguistic features in terms of verbal repertoires; the role of social meaning as a determinant of acceptability and the "creative aspect of language use"; the effects of personal identity, role, and setting as constraints on competence) point to severe limitations of present linguistic theory and stimulate efforts to overcome them. As to (3), if we take "integrated" to encompass the structure of sentences within the structure of discourse, of referential meaning within the meanings of speech acts, and of dialects and languages within the organization of verbal repertoires and speech communities, then we can see a convergence implicit in much of the best recent work and envisage a unity it can attain.

Orientations and concerns in sociolinguistics

The term sociolinguistics means many things to many people, and of course no one has a patent on its definition. Indeed, not everyone whose work is called sociolinguistic is ready to accept the label, and those who use the term include and emphasize different things. Nevertheless, three main orientations can be distinguished, orientations that can be labeled: the social as well as the linguistic; socially realistic linguistics; socially constituted linguistics. Let me characterize each of these in relation to linguistic theory.

The social as well as the linguistic. Here may be placed ventures into social problems involving language and the use of language, which are not seen as involving a challenge to existing linguistics. American linguistics does have a tradition of practical concerns-one can mention Sapir's semantic research for an international auxiliary language, Bloomfield's work in the teaching of reading, Swadesh's literacy work, the "Army method" of teaching foreign languages. The salient examples today involve American cities and developing nations and concern problems of education, minority groups, and language policies. For the most part this work is conceived as application, lacking theoretical content, or else as pursuing theoretical concerns that are in addition to those of normal linguistics, or perhaps even wholly unrelated to them. When sociolinguistics serves as a legitimizing label for such activity, it is, as said, not conceived as a challenge to normal linguistics; linguists who perceive such a challenge in the label tend to eschew it.

Socially realistic linguistics.I owe this term to Maxine Bernstein, in whose dissertation in progress (at the University of Pennsylvania) I encountered it. This term is apt for work that extends and challenges existing linguistics with data from the speech community. The challenge, and indeed the accomplishment, might be summed up in the two words, variation and validity. An outstanding example is the work of William Labov, whose orientation toward linguistics is represented in his recently published papers. The expressed theoretical concerns are not distinct from those of normal linguistics, e.g., the nature of linguistic rules and of sound change, but the method of work and the findings differ sharply. Here might also be classified work in which dependence of the analysis of meaning and speech acts on social context is recognized.

Socially constituted linguistics. This orientation is less developed than the first two but represents, I think, the fundamental challenge to which sociolinguists have come. The phrase "socially constituted" is intended to express the view that social function gives form to the ways in which linguistic features are encountered in actual life. With this assumption, an adequate approach must begin by identifying social functions and discover the ways in which linguistic features are selected and grouped together to serve them. Such a point of view cannot leave normal linguistic theory unchallenged (as does the first orientation), nor limit its challenge to reform, because its own goals are not allowed for by normal theory and cannot be achieved by "working within the system." A socially constituted linguistics shares the practical concerns of other orientations; it shares concern for social realism and validity; but even if it could wait for the perfection of a "linguistic theory" of the normal sort, it could not then use such a theory. Many of the features and relationships with which a socially constituted linguistics must deal would never have been taken up in that kind of theory. (That is why, indeed, "linguistic theory" of the normal sort is not a "theory of language," but only a theory of grammar.) A socially constituted linguistics is concerned with social as well as referential meaning, and with language as part of communicative conduct and social action. Its task is the thoroughgoing critique of received notions and practices, from the standpoint of social meaning, that is, from a functional perspective. Such a conception reverses the structuralist tendency of most of the twentieth century, toward the isolation of referential structure, and the posing of questions about social functions from that standpoint. The goals of social relevance and social realism can be fully accomplished only from the standpoint of the new conception, for much of what must be taken into account, much of what is there-organized and used-in actual speech can only be seen, let alone understood, when one starts from function and looks for the structure that serves it.

I have given examples to support this thesis in earlier papers. Here let me merely mention the following instances:

From a comprehensive functional standpoint, a phonetic feature such as aspiration appears to be a true phonological universal, specialized to referential function in some languages, and to stylistic function in others (hence not of indifference to general theory in its role in English).

Recognition of a social-identifying function motivates an independently controllable articulation otherwise left unintelligible.

The status of a sentence as a speech act depends upon the rights and obligations, roles and statuses, of the participants.

Unless one extends the rules governing a verbal summons in English to include nonverbal acts (a knock, a telephone ring), a significant generalization is lost; similarly, the function of deixis in San Blas Cuna is served by a set of forms that includes lip pointing.

Speech probably serves to mark sex-role status in every community, but linguists hitherto have discovered it only when intrusive in a normal grammatical description.

Some consistent ways of speaking make use of the resources of more than one language (e.g., the Dutch of Surinam blacks, who impose a norm that is grammatically and lexically standard, but phonologically creole).

In some communities, distinct languages can be described as lexically distinct with a common grammar and phonology (Kupwar approaches this).

The semantic structure represented by a choice of pronoun in one community may be expressed by a choice of dialect in another, and choice of language in still a third, so that analysis of the function from a universal standpoint cannot stay with one part of language, or even within the category language.

In sum, if our concern is social relevance and social realism, we must recognize that there is more to the relationship between sound and meaning than is dreamt of in normal linguistic theory. In sound there are stylistic as well as referential features and contrasts; in meaning there is social as well as referential import; in between there are relationships not given in ordinary grammar but there for the finding in social life.

"Expressive language, speech levels, social dialects, registers, functional varieties, code- and style-switching are familiar and essential concepts; and the interlocked subjects of stylistics, poetics, and rhetoric have flourished in recent years."

It is not that phenomena pointing to a more general conception of the relationship between sound and meaning have not long been noted, and often enough studied with insight and care. Expressive language, speech levels, social dialects, registers, functional varieties, code- and style-switching are familiar and essential concepts; and the interlocked subjects of stylistics, poetics, and rhetoric have flourished in recent years. Anything that can be accomplished in theory and method for a socially constituted linguistics must incorporate and build on that work, which has done much to shape what I write here. But the tendency has been to treat such phenomena and such studies as marginal or as supplementary to grammar. The hegemony of grammar as a genre and that of the referential function as its organizing basis have been preserved. The essence of a functional approach is to take function as problematic, not for granted; to assume as part of a universal theory of language that a plurality of functions are served by linguistic features in any act and community; to require validation of the relationships between features and functions, and of their organization into varieties, registers, ways of speaking, ethnographically within the community; and to take functional questions-a functional perspective-as having priority, that is, as being fundamental, both in general theory and in specific accounts, to whatever can be validly said as to structure, competence, universals, etc.

Such a perspective was present in the structuralism of the period before World War II and has never been wholly lost. In Anglo-American circles it has begun to come to the fore in work under the aegis of sociolinguistics in recent years. Salient examples include the work of Labov on "sociolinguistic structure," of John Gumperz on verbal repertoire, of Basil Bernstein on codes, of Joshua Fishman on domains, of Norman Denison and R. B. Le Page on multilingualism, and of Susan Ervin-Tripp on sociolinguistic rules. What is important here is the element in each work that contributes to a general methodological perspective. Such work goes beyond the recognition and analysis of particular cases to suggest a mode of organization of linguistic features other than that of a grammar. The common implication which I want to emphasize and elaborate is, in its weaker form, that such alternative modes of organization exist; and, in its stronger form, that one or more such alternative modes of organization may be fundamental.

The speech community

There is a second point, linked to the first, and owing its full recognition to much the same body of work: a conception of the speech community not in terms of language alone (especially not just one language, and a fortiori not just one homogeneous language).

Many linguists, although they would find the wording odd, might accept a definition of the object of linguistic description as the organization of features within a community. From the present standpoint the wording is not odd, but vital. The two points just stated in negative terms can now be put positively:

(1) The organization of linguistic features within a speech community is in terms of ways of speaking within a verbal repertoire.

(2) Membership in a speech community consists in sharing one (or more) ways of speaking.

The often stated foundation of linguistic theory, that in a speech community some utterances are the same, differing only in "free" variation, and that the goal of theory is to explain what counts as contrast and what does not, has perhaps served the development of linguistics well in its purely "referential" interpretation. One bird of function in the hand, so to speak, may have been preferable to entering the bush to cope with two. But, to elaborate the figure, it appears that neither bird will fly without the other, even that neither is itself a whole bird. To pursue the figure no doubt too far, the bird in the hand proves to be a featherless monopteron, to be restored only out of the ashes of conventional grammar. The true foundation of theory and method is that in a speech community some ways of speaking are the same, that some of the persons talk the same way.

A community, then, is to be characterized in terms of a repertoire of ways of speaking. Ways of speaking are to be characterized in terms of a relationship between styles, on the one hand, and contexts of discourse, on the other. The formal concept underlying speech styles is what Ervin-Tripp has called rules of co-occurrence. The formal concept of relating speech styles to contexts of discourse is called by her rules of alternation. The speech styles defined by rules of co-occurrence draw on the linguistic varieties present in a community, from whose resources they select and group features in sometimes complex ways. The relationships dubbed rules of alternation are in the first instance considerations of appropriateness, and of marked and unmarked usage.

The recognition of Ervin-Tripp of speech styles themselves as the elements of a further system of rules is comparable in nature and importance to the earlier recognition of grammatical transformations (as rules operating on rules). The study of the structure of relationships among speech styles opens up the possibility of a generative approach; and it makes the study of social meaning as embodied in roles, activities, and situations integral to the explanation of the meanings of the speech styles themselves.

Linguistics of course does not itself command analysis of social role, activities, and situations. Of this, two things can be said. First, such analysis is necessary. There really is no way that linguistic theory can become a theory of language without encompassing social meaning, and that signifies becoming a part of the general study of communicative conduct and social action. Second, this step is dictated by the development of linguistics itself. Having begun its structural course at the far side of meaning, with a focus on phonology, linguistics has proceeded through successive foci on morphology, syntax, semantics, and now performative and speech acts. There is no way to analyze speech acts adequately without ethnography; no language is a perfect metalanguage for the acts that can be performed with it. The study of speech acts can indeed be a center of a socially constituted linguistics, but its own logic broaches the general study of the vocabulary of action, in communities and in social science. Again, if we take seriously Chomsky's implicit call for linguistics to concern itself with the "creative aspect" of language use, and with the basis of the ability to generate novel yet appropriate sentences, we again are forced into analysis of setting as well as syntax. For appropriateness is not a property of sentences, but of a relationship between sentences and contexts, especially with regard to the property of "creativity"-whether that is saying something new in a familiar setting or something familiar in a setting that is new. At every turn, it almost would seem, linguistics is wrestling with phenomena and concepts that turn out to entail relationships, only one pole of which is within linguistics' usual domain. The true generalizations can never be captured except from a perspective that encompasses both poles.

"Rules of conduct in relation to roles and settings; the role of a language variety in socialization or in boundary maintenance; values, conceptions of the self, and beliefs as to the rights and duties one owes to others as fellow members of a community-all will be found to have a place."

To bring out this point one may say that a socially constituted linguistics has as a goal a kind of explanatory adequacy complementary to that proposed by Chomsky. Chomsky's type of explanatory adequacy leads away from speech, and from languages, to relationships possibly universal to all languages and possibly inherent in human nature. It is an exciting and worthwhile prospect. The complementary type of adequacy leads away from what is common to all human beings and all languages toward what particular communities and persons have made of their means of speech. It is comparative and evolutionary in a sociocultural, rather than biological, sense. It sees as in need of explanation the differential elaboration of means of speech, and of speech itself. At a surface level it notices gross contrasts in speech activity, from great volubility to great taciturnity; gross contrasts in elaboration of message form; gross contrasts in the predominance of traditional and of spontaneously encoded utterance; gross contrasts in the complication, or simplification, of the obligatory surface structure of languages themselves. These contrasts, and the typologies to which they point, no doubt find their explanation at a deeper level. Rules of conduct in relation to roles and settings; the role of a language variety in socialization or in boundary maintenance; values, conceptions of the self, and beliefs as to the rights and duties one owes to others as fellow members of a community-all will be found to have a place. The general problem, then, is to identify the means of speech and ways of speaking of communities; to find, indeed, where are the real communities, for language boundaries do not give them, and a person or a group may belong to more than one; to characterize communities in terms of their repertoires of these; and through ethnography, comparative ethnology, historical and evolutionary considerations, to explain something of the origin, development, maintenance, obsolescence, and loss of ways of speaking and types of speech community-of the face speech wears for human beings before they learn that it is language, a thing apart, and the property of linguists.

This complementary goal of explanatory adequacy comes not, it must be admitted, from the internal logic of linguistics, but from an external aspiration. Chomsky's type of explanatory adequacy, to be sure, would seem to owe much to his own concern to understand the human mind and to revitalize rationalist philosophy. He has made his concern an effective goal for many in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The concern that motivates explanation directed toward ways of speaking and speech communities may or may not find a similar response. This concern, put simply, is with human liberation.

If linguistic research is to help as it could in transcending the many inequalities in language and competence in the world today, it must be able to analyze inequalities. In particular, a practical linguistics so motivated would have to go beyond means of speech and types of speech community to a concern with persons and social structure. If competence is to mean anything useful (we do not really need a synonym for grammar), it must refer to the abilities actually possessed by persons. A salient fact about a speech community, realistically viewed, is the unequal distribution of abilities, on the one hand, and of opportunities for their use, on the other. This appears to be an old story in mankind, e.g., a cursory look at the globe discloses that definition of women as communicatively second-class citizens is widespread. When, where and what they may speak, the conceptions of themselves as speakers with which they are socialized, show again and again that from the community point of view they at least are not "ideal speakers," though they may on occasion be ideal hearers.

The goal of explanatory adequacy with regard to speech communities as comprising ways of speaking will be quite enough, I suppose, for most linguists to consider, let alone to accept. Yet, I believe, if linguistics is to realize its potential for the well-being of mankind, it must go even further and consider speech communities as comprising not only rules, but also sometimes oppression, sometimes freedom, in the relation between personal abilities and their occasions of use.

Conclusion

"Some can recall a generation ago when proper American linguists did not study meaning, and ethnographers had little linguistic method."

What, then, is the scope of sociolinguistics? Not all I have just described but, rather, that part of it which linguists and social scientists leave unattended. The final "goal" of sociolinguistics, I think, must be to preside over its own liquidation. The flourishing of a hybrid term such as sociolinguistics reflects a gap in the disposition of established disciplines with respect to reality. Sometimes new disciplines do grow from such a state of affairs, but the recent history of the study of language has seen the disciplines adjacent to a gap grow themselves to encompass it. Some can recall a generation ago when proper American linguists did not study meaning, and ethnographers had little linguistic method. A study of meaning in another language or culture (say, grammatical categories or kinship terms) could qualify as "ethnolinguistic" then. Today of course semantics is pursued in both linguistics and ethnography, and a mediating interdisciplinary label is unnecessary; "semantics" itself will usually suffice.

Let us hope for a similar history for sociolinguistics. In one sense the issue again is the study of meaning, only now, social meaning.

In 1934, Sapir wrote: "The social psychology into which the conventional cultural and psychological disciplines must eventually be resolved is related to these paradigmatic studies as an investigation into living speech is related to grammar. I think few cultural disciplines are as exact, as rigorously configurated, as self-contained as grammar, but if it is desired to have grammar contribute a significant share to our understanding of human behavior, its definitions, meanings, and classifications must be capable of a significant restatement in terms of a social psychology which...boldly essays to bring every cultural pattern back to the living context from which it has been abstracted in the first place...back to its social matrix."Edward Sapir, " The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures," Journal of Social Psychology 5, no. 3 (1934): 408-410.

Sapir had begun to rethink the nature of language, culture, and society from a standpoint he sometimes called "psychiatric," or "social psychology," and which today we might more readily label the standpoint of social interaction, or communicative conduct: the standpoint, as I would see it, of sociolinguistics. Obviously, Sapir's intellectual lead did not prevail after his death in 1939, although its influence can be traced in many quarters. Such a fact must humble expectation. But a decade ago I did venture to predict:

"It may be that the development of these foci of interest [semantic description, sociolinguistic variation] will lead historians of twentieth-century linguistics to say that whereas the first half of the century was distinguished by a drive for the autonomy of language as an object of study and a focus upon description of structure, the second half was distinguished by a concern for the integration of language in sociocultural context and a focus upon the analysis of function."Dell Hymes, ed., Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 11.

The SSRC's Committee on Sociolinguistics, with support provided by the National Science Foundation, cosponsored with Georgetown University its 23rd Annual Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, March 16-18, 1972. This article is a condensed version of the paper Dell Hymes presented at the meeting. The full version will be published in Roger W. Shuy, ed., Sociolinguistics: Current Trends and Prospects (Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, No. 25, 1972), by Georgetown University Press, with whose permission this version is printed here. The other members of the Committee on Sociolinguistics are Charles A. Ferguson, Stanford University; Allen D. Grimshaw, Indiana University; John J. Gumperz, University of California, Berkeley; William D. Labov, University of Pennsylvania; staff, David Jenness. The idea of a conference on the state of the field of sociolinguistics was conceived by Charles Ferguson, chairman of the committee 1963-70.

Dell Hymes (1927-2009) is considered one of the founding members of the sociolinguistics movement. He was professor of folklore and linguistics and then dean of the College of Graduate Studies in Education at the University of Pennsylvania until 1987. He then moved to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia from where he retired in 2000. He authored and edited various books on linguistics and sociolinguistics, including Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), and was one of the founding editors of the journal Language in Society. Hymes served as a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council from 1969 until 1972, and as chairman of its Committee on Sociolinguistics (1970-1979).

This essay originally appeared in Items Vol. 26, No. 2 in June of 1972. Visit our archives to view the original as it first appeared in the print editions of Items.

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The term "sociolinguistics" began to gain currency about ten years ago. The subsequent decade has seen a great deal of activity. There have been general symposia; symposia on major topics; notable major research efforts; the launching of series of working papers; books of readings, increasingly specific to the field; textbooks; even a series of collected papers of middle-aged men who find themselves senior scholars; and journals.

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Esta página describe la diferencia en el habla en 10 áreas diferentes de habla hispana. La diferencia en el habla, la pronunciación y las expresiones se conoce como dialecto. En España, los tres grupos dialectales más grandes son el castellano (norte y centro de España), el andaluz (sur de España) y el murciano (sureste de España). También hay muchos grupos de idiomas distintos en España. El autor también divide las Américas en tres dialectos distintos: español latinoamericano, español Roplatense y español caribeño.

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10 Spanish Dialects: How Spanish is Spoken Around the World - ALTA Language Services

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Even within a single language or language group there may be major differences in speech. The term dialect refers to those differences in intonation and pronunciation - and even words and expressions that exist in some branches of a language while absent in others. Spanish has a rich history that ...

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Esta página tiene mucha información excelente sobre el idioma guaraní y la cultura de las personas. Sigue prosperando a pesar de la colonización española y era un idioma hablado por los pueblos indígenas en la mitad sur del mundo. Actualmente sigue siendo uno de los idiomas oficiales de Paraguay, que es una forma de mantener el idioma protegido según el libro de la clase.

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Guaraní: The Language and People
Nathan Page
Linguistics 450
Nestled among the jungle of South American Indian idioms lies a language that continues to survive and even thrive despite repeated failures of its relatives to do the same. The language of Guaraní, a language once spoken throughout most of the southern half of the new world by native Americans, now occupies a seat next to Spanish as one of the official languages of Paraguay. The name itself stems from a Guaranian word, guariní, meaning "war" or "warrior" and is indicative of this people's bloody past as one of many contending tribes of South America (Facts). Presently, however, it represents a people and a culture that are trying to hold on to their ethnic heritage—and succeeding.

CLASSIFICATION:

The Guaraní language is part of the Tupí-Guaraní language family, a family that includes many of the indigenous languages south of the Amazon. The two prominent branches of this family, Tupí and Guaraní, probably stemmed from this common proto-language nearly 2000 years ago. Going back even further, linguists speculate the existence of a Tupian stock, a group of 37 language families that shared a mutual ancestor nearly 5000 years ago, approximately 3000 B.C. (Payne 49, Lengua 16). However, as with most classifications of South American Indian languages, such groupings are merely speculations based on the limited data currently compiled and could change with future research.

As for the present, though, ten different dialects combine under the category of Guaraní to provide a method of communication for over four and a half million people in the countries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay (Grimes). Of these sub languages, Paraguayan Guaraní is spoken by more than 98% of all Guaraní speakers. Thus this dialect is the focus of research presented here and will be hereafter referred to simply as "Guaraní".

The earliest ancestors of the Guaranian people probably journeyed from another continent to a common harbor in South or Central America and then migrated southward in smaller groups. No conclusive evidence has been found, however, that can accurately pinpoint this initial habitation site, or the original continent from which these people traveled. Modern linguistic techniques can only place the location of the Tupian branch somewhere between the Ji-Paraná and Aripuaná rivers, tributaries to the Madeira in northern Brazil, approximately 5000 years ago (Lengua 16). From this location, various migrations during the next 3000 years dispersed the people of this common tongue. Various sub-languages also developed, of which Tupí-Guaraní was a part. With the passage of additional time, this proto-language developed into the various languages that make up the Tupí-Guaraní family and Guaraní came into existence (17). The language of this time period probably had between 1.5 and 2 million speakers and is often referred to as Indigenous Guaraní (20).

During the next several hundred years not much is known about the linguistic changes that occurred in this primitive tongue. Contact with other language families—or even modified members of the same group—probably had an impact on the form of Guaraní that was first discovered by foreigners. The earliest records in western civilization indicating the existence of the Guaraní language are found beginning in the 16th century. In a letter written by Diego García in 1530, avati, the Guaranian word for "corn," is mentioned (17). Other explorers and visitors from the Old World also made mention of this indigenous people and their language, but it was not until the next century and the arrival of missionaries that much care was taken in recording or understanding this strange tongue. In 1639, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya of Spain presented in Madrid the first of three publications documenting and explaining the "treasure of the Guaraní language"—as the book was titled (Tesoro de la Lengua Guaraní) (Rodrigues 13). Such efforts by Montoya and other missionary-linguists served to provide written records of the language for the first time but also proved to leave a lasting effect on the language itself. These effects, along with the effects of language contact with other Spanish colonists, led to the evolution of Colonial Guaraní.

Colonial Guaraní was different from Indigenous Guaraní in three main aspects. First, Montoya and others integrated the Latin alphabet into the language, thus creating a written form. Such a process probably caused some phonemic change (at least among literate individuals) as phonemes foreign to Latin alphabetic transcriptions would have had to have been modified in order to fit the system. Second, Guaranian words were forced into one of the "eight parts of speech" present in Spanish at the time. Again, language aspects of Guaraní that were foreign to those of Romantic systems would have had to have been modified in order to fit into the paradigm. Finally, a lexicon of Guaraní vocabulary was created and the semantic quality of some terms was extended, especially in the area of religion. For example, Guaranian words Tupn (Great Spirit) and Karai (sacred) were extended to mean "God" and "Christian" (or "Lord") respectively (Elogio 91). Borrowing was also common with the close proximity of the two languages being spoken and Guaranian speakers gleaned new words from the Spanish immigrants.

With the exit of the Jesuit Priests near the middle of the 18th century, efforts were begun to "castellanize" the native inhabitants. Schools were created for the teaching of Spanish and teachers were hired that only spoke Spanish (Lengua 104-7). Rather than converting the people to the conquering language, though, such efforts created a high degree of bilingualism: Spanish was spoken in official settings and schools, but Guaraní was still spoken in the homes. Guaraní wasn't totally unaffected, however, and by the beginning of the 19th century, uninfluenced native Guaraní-speaking communities were basically extinct. The result was a language that was sort of indigenous, colonial, and Christian all at the same time (Elogio 25). It still had the same roots and speech patterns as original Guaraní, but many words had been borrowed from Spanish, or even created, to describe things that required no descriptions or distinctions before. Interestingly, some of these changes weren't always positive and in some instances they served to accent the social division between the two races. Take, for instance, synonyms for the names of the languages themselves in Guaraní. For Spanish we find karai n½L, language of the Lord, and for Guaraní we find ava n½L, language of man (Facts). Sulanguage changes assisted the early Spanish settlers in their aspirations of conquest and conversion.

Sound changes also occurred in the language during this time, but such changes are hard to trace due to the scarcity of written records. Some attempts have been made, however, to reconstruct the original phonology of the language by examining works of Montoya and others and utilizing the sounds represented in 17th century written Spanish (Rodrigues 15). Using these reconstructed phonemic inventories, modern linguists have been able to determine that complex vowel shifting has occurred over the last 350 years, and that other phonemes have been added or dropped from this inventory (Key 36). Such changes probably occurred as both a result of constant Spanish contact as well as trends towards natural language shifting over time.

PRESENT AND FUTURE:

In 1992 another milestone was reached in the history of the Guaraní language when it was recognized by the Paraguayan government as one of two official languages of the nation. Currently it is the only indigenous language of South America to have achieved such a status. Both Guaraní and Spanish are taught in schools and there seems to be a degree of coequality of attitudes towards these two forms of expression (Solé 297). Spanish seems to be spoken more in matters of business or administration, but Guaraní finds an equal stature among art, expression, and everyday living. Whether or not this coexistence will last is unclear, but arrival at such a point, if even for a short time, is a unique ethnolinguistic accomplishment.

Much more remains to be discovered of this language, people, and culture. As with all South American languages, classification efforts have only just begun. The true origins of the Guaraní and their aboriginal relatives are still much of a mystery. In Guaraní, the word for language, n½L, is also the word for soul. By discovering and preserving the language of this people we can, in essence, see more clearly through the window of their soul.

Works Cited

"Facts about the Guaraní Language." Guarani Home Page. http://merece.uthscsa.edu/gram/Guarani/facts-eng.htr (26 Jan. 2000).

Grimes, Barbara F., ed. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 13th ed. SIL International, 1999. Ethnologue Online www.sil.org/ethnologue/ethnologue/.html (22 Jan 2000).

Key, Mary Ritchie, ed. Language Change in South American Indian Languages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Meliá, Bartomeu. Elogio de la Lengua Guaraní: Contextos para una educación bilingüe en el Paraguay. Asunción, Paraguay: CEPAG, 1995.

Meliá, Bartomeu. La Lengua Guaraní del Paraguay: Historia, sociedad, y literatura. Madrid, Spain: Mapfre, 1992.

Payne, Doris L, ed. Amazonian Linguistics: Studies in Lowland South American Languages. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Rodrigues, Daniele M. Grannier. Fonologia do Guarani Antigo. Campinas, Brazil: Editora da UNICAMP, 1990.

Solé, Yolanda Russinovich. "The Guaraní-Spanish situation." Georgetown Journal of Languages and Linguistics 2 (1991): 297-348.

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Guaraní: The Language and People Nathan PageLinguistics 450 Nestled among the jungle of South American Indian idioms lies a language that continues to survive and even thrive despite repeated failures of its relatives to do the same.

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Leer sobre la historia de las lenguas indígenas es un aspecto de esta clase que me parece muy interesante. Este artículo habla sobre algunas de las principales lenguas indígenas y la historia de las personas que las hablan. El quechua es el idioma más hablado en América del Sur y se deriva del imperio inca. Algo interesante sobre el idioma maya es que hay 30 dialectos diferentes.

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South America has a rich linguistic heritage. According to The World Bank's 2015 study " Indigenous Latin America in the 21st century," the number of languages spoken in the region is 560, although some studies estimate that before Spanish colonization the continent was home to over 2,000.

This diversity is in part due to the continent's geography; dense jungles, snow-capped mountains and deserts separate communities making contact difficult with other groups. Large empires like the Incas, the Mayans, and the Aztecs reduced linguistic diversity when they conquered large swathes of land and people, but even today, there are remote monolingual groups nestled in the harder-to-reach corners of South America's topography.

The United Nations designated 2019 as the Year of Indigenous Languages, and we take a look at the predominant native languages that are still being used on the continent.

Quechua

Quechua is spoken by an estimated six to eight million speakers across the Andean region, making it the most spoken language in South America. Citizens of the Incan empire communicated primarily in Quechua, and its predominance in the region even meant that Spanish colonists accepted it as a tool to communicate with the native population.

In Quechua, a speaker has to add a suffix qualifying the amount of authority they give to each statement. In this way, they can take full responsibility for the truth of a statement, pass it off onto someone else, or show that no responsibility can be taken whether a phrase is true or not.

Although Quechua has millions of speakers, UNESCO still labels it as an endangered language and until recently, the Peruvian government had few language preservation policies in place. In 2016, however, TV Perú introduced a Quechua-language daily news program called Ñuqanchik meaning "All of us," and in Cusco, the language is starting to be taught in some schools.

Mayan

Six million people speak Mayan across Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, but there are about 30 different dialects. They may be from the same language family, but for the most part, those who speak one dialect of Mayan cannot understand those who speak another.

Three of these dialects have developed the use of tone, where using a higher, lower, or longer tone changes the meaning of a word. As an example, eek means star in Yucatan Maya, but éek (with a higher tone) is translated as dirty.

The different forms of Maya make it almost impossible to protect them all, but Guatemala's government has recognized 21 of the different dialects, while Mexico's has recognized eight. Hip hop group B'alam Ajpu uses a mix of Spanish and Mayan languages in their music in addition to running a school that promotes Mayan language and culture among young people.

Guaraní

An anomaly on the list, Guaraní is the only indigenous language in South America that is spoken by non-indigenous people as a native language. Its predominance in Paraguay is related to the death of 70% of the male population in the 1870 Paraguayan war, and President Carlos Antonio Lopez realized he had to bridge the divide between the indigenous and Spanish-descended population to ensure the country's survival.

Paraguayan linguist and professor David Galearno Oliviera told Latin America Reports that because over 90% of Paraguayans understand Guaraní, it is often used on the sports field to confuse their opponents.

Guaraní is not an at-risk language in Paraguay, where it is an official language and is increasingly used in formal areas such as politics and television. There are even Guaraní versions of Facebook, Wikipedia and Mozilla Firefox.

Aymara

Aymara, which is spoken in Peru and Bolivia by nearly an estimated 2.5 million people, has many similarities to Quechua, but linguistics studies have proved that is likely to be from recent lexical borrowings rather than a shared heritage.

According to a study by cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez, Aymara also has a back-to-front concept of time, where the past lies ahead and the future behind. The word for tomorrow, q"ipüru, can be literally translated to mean "some day behind one's back."

Aymara has a strong cohort of contemporary speakers and is one of Bolivia's 37 official languages, as well as having co-official status in Peru in some regions. Bolivian President Evo Morales' native language is Aymara, and he often employs the it in speeches, notably at the United Nations in New York this past February. Perú TV has also created a daily Aymara-language news program.

Nahuatl

A Central Mexican language dating back to the Aztec empire in the 15th century, Nahuatl was originally partially written with pictographs, but like many languages on this list, adopted a Latin alphabet after the conquest. The word for poetry is directly translated as "speech with flowers" and the language has a strong literary tradition of myths, poems and stories.

Many Spanish and English words derive from Nahuatl, such a chocolate, chili and guacamole. The Spanish word for avocado - aguacate - stems from Nahuatl's which means testicle in the indigenous language. Linguists believe this is due to the shape of the fruit.

Nahuatl has around 1.5 million speakers, but this number is in decline. Since 2003, the Mexican state has implemented laws to help indigenous communities maintain their ethnic and linguistic identity, and in the town of Hueypan, the government has sponsored a community-led program that teachers Nahuatl to the local youth.

After these five languages, the number of native speakers of indigenous languages in South America drop off sharply- UNESCO classifies 108 of these languages as endangered. Of the eight most critically endangered languages in the region, seven have fewer than ten remaining speakers.

The Yagan language, for example, from Tierra de Fuego at the southernmost tip of the continent, has just one living speaker left and is emblematic of how more than just semantics and morphology are at stake when indigenous languages go extinct. These languages are an integral part of cultural identity and offer a distinct interpretation of the world around us.

In 1994, the Yagan language received international recognition from the Guinness Book of World Records for having the "most succinct" word: mamihlapinatapai. Mamihlapinatapai is translated as "looking at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do."

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South America's indigenous languages: Where are they now?

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South America has a rich linguistic heritage. According to The World Bank's 2015 study " Indigenous Latin America in the 21st century," the number of languages spoken in the region is 560, although some studies estimate that before Spanish colonization the continent was home to over 2,000.

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El español es el segundo idioma más utilizado en Internet. Esto puede verse como un logro, pero según alguien de la RAE, esto está afectando la alfabetización. El aumento en la actividad de Internet también ha venido con una disminución en la alfabetización según los maestros. Creen que Internet está causando una disminución en la calidad del idioma español.

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A user of WhatsApp gets a message ready. JULIÁN ROJAS

Almost 470 million people speak Spanish as their native language around the world, while another 21 million study it as a second language. What's more it's the third-most-widely spoken language on the internet and the second on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the latest report by the Instituto Cervantes. But the state-funded body responsible for teaching Spanish around the world also warns of what it calls the poor state of spoken and written Spanish.

Almost eight percent of internet users speak to each other in Spanish, a ratio that reflects its spectacular growth over the last two decades

"I have said this many times and I repeat my words: the state of Spanish is shabby," says Victor García de la Concha, the head of the Instituto Cervantes and a member of Spain's Royal Academy of Spanish (RAE), expressing the concerns of academics and teachers. "The reasons are to do with people not reading enough, or reading poor-quality material, along with not having been taught the language properly," García de la Concha explains.

During his time as head of the RAE, García de la Concha was responsible for creating what he called pan-Hispanic global alliances. This was a time of expansion. During the final phase of his tenure, in the last four years, resources have been scarce, but he has made a virtue out of necessity and encouraged stronger ties with Latin America.

His experience has made him optimistic about the figures, but pessimistic toward what he sees as the qualitative decline of the language. Neither does he blame the digital age directly: "The experts warn us that there is no clear relationship between the increasingly present signs and impoverishment, but we still lack perspective on this," says García de la Concha. In his opinion, the answers are largely in the hands of the politicians, as well as the independence of the Instituto Cervantes. "It would be desirable for this institution to have a more independent management model, like that of the Prado Museum or the National Library. We don't want to be subject to political comings and goings."

He speaks from experience. The position he now occupies has been suffering a kind of funneling effect within the framework of a political war between the Culture and Foreign ministries, a war that dates back to the previous Socialist Party-run administration (2004 to 2011), and that continues today under the government of Mariano Rajoy.

A global language, adapted to the worldwide web

There are 559 million Spanish speakers around the world, ranging from native speakers to those with just a basic grasp of the language.

Some 6.7 percent of the 7.2 billion inhabitants of the planet are already Spanish speaking, compared to Russian or French and German speakers, who make up just 2.2 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively.

It is the world's second-most-widely spoken language, taking into account native speakers, those with limited knowledge, and students.

As a mother tongue, it is the second-most-widely spoken language, after Mandarin Chinese.

Demography helps, given that the population of Latin American countries continues to grow, while the proportion of English and Chinese speakers is falling.

Spanish is the third-most used language on the internet, after English and Chinese.

Some 7.9 percent of internet users communicate in Spanish.

It is the second-most-used language on the social networks.

Use of Spanish has grown by 1,100 percent between 2000 and 2013.

By 2030, Spanish speakers will make up 7.5 percent of the world's population.

Within three or four generations, a 10th of the world will be able to speak and communicate in Spanish.

Both ministries have launched battles for control of the Instituto Cervantes, and with it power over policy of something as strategic as Spanish, since former Culture Minister César Antonio Molina tried to bring it under his ministry's ambit. Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo and José Maria Lassalle, the secretary of state for culture, have not let up during the last four years.

A growing number of voices are arguing that giving the Cervantes greater autonomy would help resolve the internecine warfare. The current power vacuum has illustrated the problem.

There are other signs of optimism in the figures, as was outlined last week by the authors of the Instituto Cervantes report, David Fernández Vítores of Madrid's Complutense University, and José Montero Reguera, of the University of Vigo. The group of potential users who are native speakers and with more limited use today reaches some 559 million people around the world. In 2030, 7.5 percent of the world population will be Spanish speaking. At present, the figure is 6.7 percent, much higher than Russian speakers (2.2 percent) and just 1.1 percent for French and German.

Spanish has also benefited from being widely spoken in the United States and Great Britain.

Almost eight percent of internet users speak to each other in Spanish, a ratio that reflects the spectacular growth of use of the language over the last two decades.

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Spanish now second-most-spoken language on the social networks

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Almost 470 million people speak Spanish as their native language around the world, while another 21 million study it as a second language. What's more it's the third-most-widely spoken language on the internet and the second on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the latest report by the Instituto Cervantes.

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Según este ensayo, la lingüística política es una construcción social y juega un papel importante en nuestras vidas. El autor afirma que el lenguaje también es algo que define la construcción social. Es interesante porque cada idioma hace esto a su manera en diferentes áreas del mundo. Por ejemplo, en los Estados Unidos tenemos una política lingüística diferente porque acepta la diversidad.

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En este artículo, el autor habla sobre la convergencia y divergencia del lenguaje en todo el mundo. El inglés es un idioma que surgió de la convergencia del francés antiguo y el inglés antiguo. Incluso si la mayoría de los idiomas completos no son siempre el resultado de la convergencia, hay convergencia en escalas más pequeñas. La fonología, la morfología, la sintaxis, el léxico son todos los niveles en los que puede ocurrir la convergencia.

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En este artículo podemos ver que la tasa de bilingüismo ha aumentado mucho en los últimos 10 años. En 1980, el porcentaje de bilingües era del 10,68%, mientras que en 2018, el porcentaje era del 20,55%. En cuarenta años, el porcentaje se ha duplicado. Esto se relaciona con lo que estamos hablando en clase porque estamos aprendiendo que es importante comprender el uso generalizado en los Estados Unidos.

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In an earlier post, I described the state of bilingualism in the United States (see here). The U.S. Census Bureau does not keep track of those who use two or more languages in their everyday lives, but since 1980 it does ask three language questions: Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English (very well, well, not well, not at all)? These questions were first asked in the census every 10 years, but are now part of the annual American Community Survey (ACS).

The data that we now have cover 1980, 1990, and every year since 2000 until 2018. Even though children under age five were left out, as were people who use a second or third language in their everyday lives but only English at home, they give us an idea of the number of bilinguals in the US and how the numbers have evolved since 1980.

Researcher Jeffrey Bloem at the University of Minnesota helped me extract the appropriate numbers from the IPUMS database which contains the census and ACS data. For each year, we tabulated those who spoke a language other than English, as well as English to varying degrees (we removed those who did not know English at all as they were not bilingual), and we worked out a percentage based on the total population. I then plotted the results obtained.

As can be seen in the graph on the left (blue function), there is a steady increase of the percentage of bilinguals between 1980 and 2018. Back in 1980, the percentage of bilinguals was 10.68% whereas in 2018, the last ACS survey for which we have data, it was 20.55%, that is 63 million inhabitants. The percentage has practically double in thirty eight years. If we add a few percentage points to take into account those not included in the survey, the proportion of bilinguals today is probably close to 23% of the total population.

Of course, this percentage is still low compared to traditionally multilingual countries (for example, in Switzerland some 42% of the population use two or more languages in everyday life) but similar to that of other countries with a world language as a national language (e. g. France with its 20%).

One will want to study the reasons for this constant rise since 1980. There is, of course, the arrival of new immigrants who learn English and hence become bilingual. Some maintain their languages from generation to generation and hence bilingualism continues. Other reasons may be the (re)learning of some older immigration languages, as well as of Native American languages, and of American Sign language. To these should be added the effort that is being made to allow children and adolescents to acquire and use a second language in the home, as well as more natural language learning opportunities in some schools with immersion and dual language programs.

Some might say that the increasing number of bilinguals goes hand in hand with an increase of inhabitants who know no English. I have plotted the results of those who report that they do not know any English in the same graph (orange function) and, as can be seen, the percentages remain very low throughout all these years. English is so important in the United States that close to 98.7% of the population know it, and use it in everyday life, according to the 2016 ACS results.

Back in 1986, I wrote an op-ed in the Miami News on the state of languages other than English in the United States. I had observed, as had others, the extremely fast shift between two monolingualisms-that of newly arrived immigrants in a non-English language, and that of the great majority of the population in English. I stated, "A national resource-the country's knowledge of the languages of the world-is being wasted and is not being replaced."

I am now happy to observe, more than 30 years later, that an effort is being made to speak and use other languages in addition to English. The position of prominence that English has in the US is in no danger, but some room is now being made for other languages. This can only lead to a person's personal enrichment, increased ties between generations and cultures, and more diversity in job opportunities.

Note: Readers interested in languages other than English in the United States should consult two documents: Karen Zeigler and Steven A. Caramota's analysis of the 2018 ACS Survey (see here) and Camille Ryan's very readable "Language Use in the United States: 2011" (see here). The latter gives details about which non-English languages are spoken at home, English language ability according to languages other than English, age, race and ethnicity, as well as language concentrations in the country.
For a full list of "Life as a bilingual" blog posts by content area, see here.

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The Amazing Rise of Bilingualism in the United States

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In an earlier post, I described the state of bilingualism in the United States (see here). The U.S. Census Bureau does not keep track of those who use two or more languages in their everyday lives, but since 1980 it does ask three language questions: Does this person speak a language other than English at home?