Alejandro Raiter

PRIMING SINTÁCTICO EN LA PRODUCCIÓN DE ORACIONES EN ESPAÑOL: ACERCA DE LA REPRESENTACIÓN SINTÁCTICA DE LOS VERBOS

Este trabajo presenta una experiencia de priming sintactico dirigida a investigar la informacion sintactica representada en las entradas lexicas de los verbos. Mediante una tarea de completamiento escrito de oraciones que manipulo las propiedades combinatorias de un conjunto de verbos (que seleccionan o bien un Sintagma Nominal o bien un Sintagma de Flexion o bien un Sintagma de Complementante) se mostro que los participantes tendian a utilizar las estructuras que habian experimentado previamente al completar nuevas oraciones. Este efecto se verifico con la misma intensidad cuando los facilitadores eran oraciones que los participantes habian producido (Condicion II), como cuando se trataba de oraciones que habian leido (Condicion I), lo que confirma hallazgos previos (i.e. Bock, 2002; Bock et al., 2007) en cuanto a que el priming tiene lugar de comprension a produccion. El experimento tambien mostro que el priming era sensible a la distincion SC/SF pero no a la estructura interna de esos constituyentes. Este hallazgo permite inferir que la informacion combinatoria (Pickering y Branigan, 1998) asociada a los nodos lema de los verbos (Levelt, Roelofs y Meyer, 1999) es de nivel sintagmatico y que codifica la naturaleza categorial de los sintagmas que el verbo selecciona.

Causalidad, iconicidad y continuidad: el efecto del conocimiento previo sobre el mundo en la comprensión de relaciones causales

This paper studies the involvement of world knowledge and its interaction with linguistic (semantic) knowledge in the understanding of causal relations. We will attempt to determine to what extent the iconicity principle and the continuity hypothesis – see especially Murray (1997) – apply in Spanish and whether they are subject to restrictions attributable to the type of information processed. We also discuss Sanders’ (2005) causality-by-default hypothesis and provide relevant evidence for assessing its correctness. To test our hypotheses, we investigate the comprehension of two-sentence texts of two types (in “everyday” and in “technical” language) under four conditions: normal and inverted order (cause–effect vs. effect–cause); with and without connective. We predict that our “type of information” variable, one of the core elements of this study, will condition causal relations processing and modify to some extent the classical claims of iconicity and continuity hypothesis. The results show that lack of prior knowledge, indeed, can affect the predictions and assumptions of the iconicity principle and the continuity hypothesis and that, if there is no prior knowledge, the introduction of linguistic clues (connectives) facilitates and even becomes indispensable for understanding.

A Homage to Beatriz R. Lavandera: An Overview of Political Discourse Analysis from the Approach of Lavandera and her Students

This article aims to pay homage to Beatriz R. Lavandera as a recognition of the dimension of her work on discourse analysis and of what she represents as a linguist in the academic world. We review some of her main ideas and describe briefly how we, as her disciples, are following her thought and teaching.