Browsing by Subject "Historical Linguistics"

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    Anglicisms and calques in upper social class in pre-revolutionary Cuba (1930-1959): A sociolinguistic analysis
    (2016-06-28) Sánchez, Jose Antonio
    The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902-1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, Diario de la Marina, and the corresponding elaboration of a corpus of English-induced loanwords. Diario de la Marina particularly targeted upper social class, and only crónicas sociales (society pages' columns) and print advertising were revised because of their fully descriptive texts, which encoded the ruling class ideology and consumerism. The findings show that there existed a high number of lexical and cultural anglicisms in the sociolect in question, and that the sociolinguistic anglicization was openly embraced by the upper socioeconomic stratum, entailing a differentiating sign of sophistication and social stratification. Likewise, a number of the anglicisms collected, particularly those related with social events, are unused in contemporary Cuban Spanish, which suggests a major semantic shifting in this sociolect after 1959.
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    Prime identification in historical languages: the Old English exponent for the semantic prime DIE.
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones., 2025) Mateo Mendaza, Raquel; Universidad de La Rioja
    This research focuses on the identification of the Old English exponent for the semantic prime DIE following the approach of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory (Goddard, 2008, 2011; Wierzbicka, 1996). The aim of this paper is to complete the research begun on Old English exponents for the category Life and Death and to review the methodology applied in previous research on this field, which is based on morphological, textual, semantic and syntactic criteria and on the search for examples of the exponent word within the alternative syntactic configurations associated with the prime. The fact that DIE is the only predicate prime which does not allow for optional arguments entails the implementation of a new methodological approach to determine the suitability of the verb selected as prime exponent. All in all, the conclusion is drawn that the OE verb sweltan is selected as the exponent of DIE in Old English.