Intensifiers have been the focus of a number of studies over the past decade, with considerable interest in their meaning and variability. Several scholars have discussed the use of such forms, particularly in English (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, Tagliamonte 2008) and Spanish (Brown and Cortés-Torres 2013; Kanwit et al. 2017), exploring their…

The present study examines the nature of the Spanish rhotics experimentally, investigating the possibilities that the trill is best understood as deriving from an underlying geminate or that the tap and trill may be separate phonemes. In order to explore these two theories, a behavioral task was designed exploiting the absence of native words in…

Central America, including El Salvador, has been cited as the least studied of the Spanish-language dialect zones. The paucity of linguistic research extends to the language use of these populations in the United States, including that of Salvadorans who have relocated there. This paper analyzes Salvadorans' utilization of "voseo" and…

This investigation contributes to the understanding of language attitudes toward consonantal deletion by examining its perception using a matched-guise experiment (Casesnoves and Sankoff 2004; Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum 1960) with fifteen listeners. Two experiments were designed for testing language attitudes, one toward…

Discusses the influence of African languages on Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America. Provides a sampling of words of African origin with notes on their derivation. (EKN)

Provides pedagogical rules for selecting relative pronouns in Spanish. Sixteen different linguistic environments in which relative pronoun usage occurs are categorized according to their different syntactic relationships and semantic intentions. (SL)

Describes the study of the use of /s/ vs. /h/ or O (in Spanish) in Valdivia, Chile, by speakers who differed in sex and age. No marked differences in relation to sex and age were found, indicating a relatively homogeneous community. (MLS)

Notes that the employment of databases to the study of the history of a language is a method that allows for substantial improvement in investigative quality. Illustrates this with the example of the application of this method to two studies of the history of Spanish developed in the Language and Information Seminary of the Independent University…

Describes the goals and responsibilities of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Liverpool University, including brief biographical sketches of staff members and a listing of research in progress. (CB)

Describes some of the current research on Brazilian Portuguese phonology. Various techniques are discussed that analysts utilize to investigate Brazilian Portuguese nasality. (49 references) (CB)

Examination of the development of form/function relations of the prepositions "por" and "para" at different levels of proficiency in the interlanguage of study-abroad students in Granada, Spain, revealed "noncanonical" as well as "canonical" uses of these prepositions. The most common noncanonical uses were…