Papers by avelino corral esteban
Routledge eBooks, Jun 27, 2023
English for Specific Purposes
Abstract This study accounts for the results obtained from a teaching innovation project called S... more Abstract This study accounts for the results obtained from a teaching innovation project called SubESPSKills (Subtitling tasks in the English for Specific Purposes class to improve written production skills) with a control and experimental group of undergraduates taking a course on Business English. The study was conducted during the 2018–2019 academic year at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Among our main goals was the improvement of writing production skills in the English for Specific Purposes class. In order to do so, reverse subtitling was used as an audiovisual translation tool to enhance participants’ written skills in a course of Business English (Degree in Commerce). With the aim of using reverse subtitling as a tool for the practice of writing in English as a foreign language, the participants were required to submit a number of activities of written production on topics related to business and commerce. Additionally, they had to subtitle two videos from Spanish/Chinese into English, related to the aforementioned area of knowledge. Subsequently, a mixed method was followed since quantitative and qualitative data were gathered and analysed. The results presented here aim to prove the potential of active reverse subtitling as a tool for foreign language learning.
Creating Orthographies for Endangered Languages
Language and Intercultural Communication, 2017
ABSTRACT The main objective of this study is to explore how students who participate in virtual i... more ABSTRACT The main objective of this study is to explore how students who participate in virtual intercultural exchanges use evaluative language to build rapport and encourage collaboration. Data were gathered from 211 email messages sent by 40 Spanish and American university students and were tagged following Martin and White’s Appraisal model. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the lexico-grammatical tokens revealed that the participants used mostly Affect tokens in their interaction. This suggests that the students preferred expressing their own feelings and emotions rather than judging their partners’ behaviour or evaluating phenomena as a strategy to construct a positive and appealing personal identity.
Studies in Language Companion Series, 2017
As multi-verb constructions are commonly believed to be a widespread feature of Native American l... more As multi-verb constructions are commonly believed to be a widespread feature of Native American languages, the aim of this paper is to offer an in-depth study of this particular phenomenon in Cheyenne (Plains Algonquian: USA) in accordance with the framework provided by Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006) and Aikhenvald and Muysken (2011), since their works cover the major parameters required for a cross-linguistic analysis of the different types of multi-verb constructions. This paper will show that, as Cheyenne does not allow for converbs that are generally considered to be examples of biclausal constructions, complex predicates should be interpreted as part of a monoclausal construction. Additionally, verb compounding is mainly asymmetrical in composition, since there are restrictions as to which verbs are included in every construction type. Indeed, the aim here is to provide a detailed description of verb combinations in Cheyenne while paying attention to their syntactic and semantic properties, thus allowing us both to observe their similarities and differences and analyse their place within the typology of multi-verb constructions.
Rael Revista Electronica De Linguistica Aplicada, 2011
This article offers a study of relative clauses in two Native American languages within the frame... more This article offers a study of relative clauses in two Native American languages within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). Despite the fact that these two languages realize these complex constructions very differently, an RRG analysis will make it possible to see both the similarities and differences between them, as well as to solve the multiple difficulties that arise when devising the logical structure for these clauses and developing their linking algorithms. Two factors play a key role in the formation of relative clauses largely, namely the type of antecedent and the presence or absence of an element in the relative clause that is coreferential with the antecedent. After checking the type of NP that is accessible to relativization by resorting to the NP accessibility hierarchy, a complete analysis of these clauses in both languages will be offered, together with a representation of the bidirectional linking system for this construction.
Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, 2012
This article attempts to provide conclusive evidence to decide on the existence or absence of pas... more This article attempts to provide conclusive evidence to decide on the existence or absence of passive in two Native American languages, namely Lakhota and Cheyenne, which exhibit a similar behaviour in this respect. Given that it is evident that these two languages do not show examples of an English-style passive, that is, considering the concept of "passive" from the viewpoint of traditional grammar, it will be necessary to study this issue from a different angle, presented in this case by the Role and Reference Grammar (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin and LaPolla, 1997). Thanks to its marked typological orientation, this theoretical framework makes it possible to see both the similarities and differences between these languages, as well as to solve the problems that arise when studying their grammar owing to their morphological complexity. With respect to grammatical voice, it is crucial to analyze these two languages typologically in terms of the morpho-syntactic parameter denominated "referential structure"´. This analysis will shed light on this issue by showing that there are two different types of languages with respect to this parameter and that this distinction has a bearing on the existence of two different types of passive, whose combination will be exhibited by the English-style passive.
Redefining Tandem Language and Culture Learning in Higher Education, 2019
English Historical Linguistics
The ITB Journal, 2012
This article has investigated interrogative sentences in Lakhota within the framework of Role and... more This article has investigated interrogative sentences in Lakhota within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin, 1995; Van Valin and LaPolla, 1997), with the aim of explaining their structure as well as finding out the restrictions on ́wh ́-question formation that this language exhibits. By means of this study, we will be able to verify the close relationship that also exists between the interrogative words and the indefinite pronouns in this language, see the constraints on linking in simple ́wh ́-questions and give an account of the subjacency effects that block the formation of ́wh ́-questions involving complex constructions. All in all, this paper will show the remarkable role that the interplay between several syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features plays in the formation of interrogative sentences, hence it will prove that the RRG analysis provides an adequate explanatory account of the structure of interrogative sentences and also of the res...
Creating Orthographies for Endangered Languages, Cambridge University Press, 2017
There is no reason to think that languages should present perfectly structured grammars with no a... more There is no reason to think that languages should present perfectly structured grammars with no anomaly in terms of verbal conjugation, case marking, argument encoding, etc., and in fact they rarely do. What is more, it is not difficult to find languages with verbal systems displaying a high degree of irregularities and, therefore, it seems plausible to assume that there may be verbs with, for example, anomalous cross-referencing patterns as well. This paper aims to shed some light on the origin of a minor group of verbs called "transitive stative verbs" in Lakota, a split-intransitive Siouan language spoken in the USA and Canada, which exhibit an extremely rare behaviour in terms of cross-referencing.
This paper has as its specific objective an attempt to put to the test two important assumptions ... more This paper has as its specific objective an attempt to put to the test two important assumptions made by the Role and Reference Grammar framework (henceforth, RRG) (Van Valin, 1993, 2005; Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997) by analysing the evidence provided by two Native American languages, namely Lakota and Cheyenne. These two assumptions, which are concerned with argument encoding and nexus relations, will be supported by evidence provided by the aforementioned languages, which belong to two different linguistic families, namely Siouan and Algonquian, and consequently exhibit very distinctive morpho-syntactic properties. Furthermore, both languages differ greatly from English, hence the findings obtained in this paper will serve to verify the typological orientation of this theoretical framework and its representational flexibility since it is able to represent comparable structures in different languages. Thus, the general purpose of this paper is to check the validity of RRG as one of t...
Esta tesis tiene como finalidad desarrollar un estudio de las lenguas ingles, lakota y cheyenne p... more Esta tesis tiene como finalidad desarrollar un estudio de las lenguas ingles, lakota y cheyenne por medio de su comparacion sintactica, tomando como base metodologica la Gramatica del Papel y la Referencia. Basandonos en los principios metodologicos de este enfoque, para analizar la realizacion sintactica tanto de las oraciones simples como de las complejas, deberemos recurrir al estudio semantico de los predicados, ya que segun este marco teorico, las cualidades semanticas de los predicados condicionan y motivan las diferentes estructuras sintacticas que se dan en una lengua determinada. Asi mismo, puntualmente tambien recurriremos a la pragmatica porque en la relacion del contexto con la sintaxis y semantica es donde se aprecian los rasgos especificos mas importantes de cada una de las lenguas. Teniendo en cuenta todo lo anterior, procederemos a la interaccion entre los sistemas sintactico y semantico por medio del conjunto de reglas u operaciones llamadas algoritmo de enlace, el ...
With the integration of new technologies in the foreign language classroom, the practice of colla... more With the integration of new technologies in the foreign language classroom, the practice of collaborative writing has gained renewed attention, although some questions still remain unanswered regarding the extent to which these tools help learners in their writing when compared to more traditional learning contexts (Elola & Oskoz, 2010). In order to explore these issues, we analysed the written production of 84 undergraduate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) using the LIWC20154 software. The analysis revealed significant differences in categories such as word count, clout, emotional tone, or analytical thinking when comparing the texts written by an experimental and a control group. Moreover, regarding discourse, some differences were observed in terms of the way information was presented and structured.
This paper provides a Role and Reference Grammar (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997) stu... more This paper provides a Role and Reference Grammar (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997) study of transitivity in Lakhota, putting special emphasis on the analysis of three-place predicates and the coding alternations they enter into. Since there exists a reasonable range of typological variation regarding the realization of this type of predicates morpho-syntactically, the main aim of this paper will be the classification of this language into one of the three major ditransitive alignment types posited by Dryer (1986) on the basis of which of the two semantic roles, that is, the Patient or Recipient, is treated like the monotransitive Undergoer. In order to achieve this goal, some obstacles concerning the fact that Lakhota is a pronominal-argument language and, consequently, all their obligatory arguments appear coded as pronominal affixes within the verb will have to be overcome. In the final section, a representation of the bidirectional linking algorithm will be offered in ...
Resumen: Mucho ha sido escrito sobre el orden de los afijos pronominales en Lakota (Siouan, 6,000... more Resumen: Mucho ha sido escrito sobre el orden de los afijos pronominales en Lakota (Siouan, 6,000 hablantes: EEUU y Canada) en los ultimos 150 anos. Las propuestas tienden a seguir dos enfoques opuestos. Uno de estos enfoques defiende que el orden relativo entre los marcadores de los argumentos del predicado esta relacionado con la asignacion de caso o del papel semantico, de tal forma que las formas pronominales estaticas, las cuales marcan caso acusativo y representan al paciente, preceden a las formas activas, las cuales marcan caso nominativo y representan al agente. El otro enfoque sostiene que el posicionamiento de los afijos pronominales en esta lengua depende del concepto de persona, de modo que estos afijos siguen el orden tercera persona + primera persona + segunda persona. Este articulo tiene como objetivo arrojar alguna luz sobre la cuestion del orden de los afijos pronominales en Lakota a traves del analisis de ejemplos de verbos estaticos transitivos aportados por dos ...
Interfaces in Functional Discourse Grammar
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Papers by avelino corral esteban