This work compares the morphosyntactic properties of expressive suffixes in four European languages: Russian, German, Spanish and Greek. It shows that although these suffixes share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. Thus, the Russian and Spanish expressive suffixes that refer to the size of a referent (or size suffixes) are syntactic modifiers, while the German size suffixes are syntactic heads. And in Greek, the two most productive expressive suffixes -ak and -ul have homophonous counterparts that possess contrasting syntactic properties: syntactic heads vs. syntactic modifiers. This shows that across languages as well as within single languages, such as Greek, there is no 1:1 correspondence between the meaning and the structure of expressive forms. These findings are further supported by two novel case studies of the homophonous suffixes -its (in Greek) and -ic (in Russian).

Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

The goal of this chapter is to examine the rules that relate syntactic and semantic representations to each other in adverbial (adjoined) clauses. The following types of adverbial clause relations are discussed, using evidence from English, Spanish, Yaqui and other languages: concessive, conditional, reason, temporal, purpose, manner and means. The chapter sheds light on the complexities of adverbial relations between clauses and how such complexities can be captured in Role and Reference Grammar.

Spain is known for having multiple languages that coexist in different geographical regions with varying degrees of political and social recognition. At the same time, Spanish historiography, argues historian García Sanjuán (2012), has been dominated by the nationalist discourse that systematically distorts the past to construct a “Spanish” and an “Andalusian” identity predicated on the exclusion of anything associated with the Arabic language and Islam, all the while the tourism sector commodifies the “exotic” Arabic past. One of the key settings that distorts and reinvents the past are the festivals of moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. Claiming to be true and faithful retellings of history, these festivals invoke a popular memory of the imagined past, while interlacing and mixing events from multiple time periods, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 to the so-called Christian reconquest, presented as an essential battle between Christianity and the Muslim invaders. In this article, I analyze one of the more popular and historically significant of these festivals, celebrated in the outpost village of Carboneras. I show that the festivals of moros y cristianos help engrain the legitimacy of nationalist ideas that seek to generate a specific hegemonic identity grounded in an affirmation of the Roman-Latin-Christian vision of the past. The language utilized in the festivals is purposefully selected to elevate and justify the actions and attitudes of the Christians and to amalgamate the identity of Moriscos, whose families had lived in these lands for centuries with that of moros from across the Mediterranean. The reenactments that skillfully play with, confuse, and obscure several periods in Spain’s history are a theatrical mirror of a real process of linguistic and social exclusion that reaches from the past to the present day.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.

Chapter 8 focuses on ditransitive verbs, which have a direct and an indirect object. In English, ditransitive verbs participate in the double object construction as well as in a prepositional dative construction. Most second language learners of English, whose language does not have a double object construction, find these structures difficult to acquire. In Spanish, direct and indirect object pronouns are clitics and appear preverbally in certain contexts. Some dative clitic constructions are like the English double object construction. Some direct objects are marked with a preposition in Spanish, which also causes significant difficulty to learners. The first part of the chapter focuses on the acquisition of the double object construction in English and covers foundational intervention studies on this topic. The second part of the chapter turns to the expression of objects in Spanish and presents classroom and lab intervention studies promoting the acquisition of accusative and dative clitic pronouns and of Differential Object Marking in second language learners and heritage speakers.

Chapter 7 is about transitive and intransitive verbs and the syntactic structures they can appear in. Transitive verbs can appear in the passive voice while intransitive verbs are ungrammatical in passive sentences. There are different types of passive structures in Japanese and Korean, and learners of English have difficulty identifying which verbs can be passivized in English. Intransitive verbs are divided into two classes according to their meaning: Agentive verbs are unergative verbs, and non-agentive verbs are unaccusative verbs. In Spanish, some unaccusative verbs appear with the reflexive pronoun se. This chapter presents the learnability problem that different types of transtive and intransitive verbs present for second language learners of English and of Spanish and discusses intervention research conducted in this area. The first part focuses on the passive voice. The second part is about unaccusative verbs, which second language learners sometimes erroneously use in the passive voice.

This chapter presents the motivation and methodology of a cross-linguistic and cross-generational study of DOM in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages. Innovative aspects of this project are the comparison of the same linguistic phenomenon cross-linguistically and in heritage languages that share the same majority language context and the inclusion of adult first generation immigrants to examine the cross-generational component. By including heritage speakers and first-generation immigrants as well as two generations of native speakers in the homeland, we examine whether changes with DOM are observed in both diaspora and homeland contexts, or only in the diaspora context. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the linguistic and situational factors that contribute to DOM erosion within and across languages. The rest of this chapter presents the research questions, more specific hypotheses and the overall methodology.

The study presented in this book focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and change of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, English and Romanian in contact with English in the United States. Differential Object Marking (DOM) is the overt marking of some direct objects and is a widespread among languages of the world. DOM is an iconic procedure because the arguments that are overtly marked morphologically are more salient/prominent semantically or pragmatically than unmarked objects. This chapter describes how DOM is manifested in Spanish, Romanian and Hindi and presents current syntactic synchronic analyses of the phenomenon in these languages. The diachronic evolution of DOM in language contact situations is also discussed.

This chapter focuses on young students’ attitudes towards the partner languages in dual-language immersion (DLI) programmes, as well as attitudes towards the speakers of these languages with implications for students’ identities as bilingual/biliterate learners in this educational context. The chapter uses example findings with primary school students (5–8 year olds) acquiring Spanish and English in a US DLI programme who are part of a multi-year research and evaluation project. Students are compared with student peers in their school’s English-medium classrooms to help understand potential differences in language attitudes stemming from their instructional experiences. This work is part of a growing call to consider the ‘whole child’ in developmental contexts and a need to employ multidisciplinary and longitudinal methods to better understand the impact of bilingual educational settings on children’s growth and well-being, moving beyond a narrow focus on academic achievement and language proficiency outcomes.

This study analyzes the use of general extenders in recorded conversations in English and Spanish between nine pairs of young adult Spanish–English bilingual friends from Southern Arizona. Building on previous studies in both languages, 325 tokens of general extenders were analyzed quantitatively according to frequency, length in words, and function (referential or non–referential), as well as the gender and language dominance of participants. It was expected that general extenders would be susceptible to borrowing in a language contact situation since discourse–pragmatic features often appear on the periphery of grammar and are detachable. However, in the speech of the same Spanish–English bilinguals, contact with English did not appear to influence the use of general extenders in Spanish. No English forms of general extenders were found in Spanish. Moreover, general extenders in Spanish were significantly longer and were used to fulfill referential functions more often than general extenders in English. As the first study to analyze the use of general extenders in English and Spanish in the speech of the same bilinguals, these results underline the ability of bilinguals to both understand and reproduce the subtleties of the use of these features in the two languages they speak.

The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact. The chapter continues with an account of the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Americas, together with the ensuing contacts with indigenous languages and languages of voluntary and involuntary immigration and the formation of Afro-Romance creole languages.

In a review of Graham’s Magazine published in the March 1, 1845 issue of The Broadway Journal, Edgar Allan Poe predicted of magazine literature, “[i]n a few years its importance will be found to have increased in geometrical ratio” because “[t]he whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward.” Busy mid-century readers, speeding along in “the rush of the age,” required a medium that kept pace. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect,” Poe insisted: “we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused – in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.”1 It can be difficult to pin down how seriously Poe took such declarations. Praise and ironic critique intertwine in his critical writings, as in subsequent paragraphs of this review, where he describes the engraving “Dacota Woman and the Assiniboin Girl” as “worthy of all commendation,” while another engraving in the same issue, “The Love Letter,” “has the air of having been carved by a very small child, with a dull knife, from a raw potato.”2 If Poe marks a genuine trend toward periodical forms of literature in the period, he also stages an ambiguous response to the trend, vacillating between praise and condemnation.