LANGUAGE Contact and Linguistic Diversity
Stephen Fafulas, East Carolina University
Language is an individual entity constrained by our cognitive abilities and woven into our biological fabric. At the same time, language is a social construct that is shaped through communication in the ever-changing world in which it is used. Without language, our means of expression, interaction, and knowledge transmission would be drastically different, if not impossible. Our species is unique in its ability to communicate through socio-culturally agreed upon symbols, which serve to draw attention to mental states and events in the outside world. While certain properties of language reflect our similarities,
others are manifestations of our differences. In part, these differences are responsible for the fact that we do not all speak the same language. In this essay, I examine how external forces, such as geo-political boundaries, population demographics, and world economies, lead to linguistic diversity and change.
A TORNALLOM. Luchas vecinales en la huerta de "La Punta".
Luis González Barrios, Bennington College
Este artículo propone un análisis ecológico-social de una serie de sucesos acontecidos, entre 1993-2003, en el barrio de La Punta, Valencia (España). Para ello analizo A tornallom (2005), un documental realizado con escasos medios que sirve de testimonio a aquellos hechos. Como apoyo teórico, La habitación de Pascal (2009), de Jorge Riechmann, una obra ensayística en la línea de la ecología social. Como inspiración, la lucha de los pueblos indígenas pre-colombinos, pueblos cuya ética ancestral centrada en el “buen vivir” y la defensa de la Tierra iluminan más que nunca nuestro convulso presente.
Exile and Border Identity: Linguistic Evidence from leísmo Use of Cecilia G. de Guilarte
Valeriya Fedonkina and Valentina Filimonova
In view of the growing importance of interdisciplinary research in modern day arts and sciences, this work brings together the fields of Hispanic literature in an attempt to explore the increasingly relevant issue of border identity. This paper presents a linguistic study of a set of literary works by a Spanish exile author, Cecilia G. Guilarte (1915-1989). It contributes methodologically and theoretically to the existing literary scholarship on exile and border narrative on the one hand and to the study of syntactic variation and language contact on the other. The works of Spanish Republican exiles such as those of Guilarte have only recently begun to gain attention in literary criticism and have not been studied by linguists. Yet, as this article attempts to show, these works present a fertile ground for research in both fields.