This sociolinguistic investigation analyzes an innovative usage of Spanish motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives in Barcelona, Spain that involves crosslinguistic pragmatic transfer. Speakers in the two social networks examined (n=58) use these Spanish deictics following pragmatic rules that generally correspond to the rules for their…

Investigates the contraction of negatives in a corpus of discourse and writing in order to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Argues that pragmatic and morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished…

Identifies a variable context in the use of two Galician verb forms and three Spanish verb forms used in Galician with identical modal, temporal, and aspectual values: the simple past indicative. Shows that this variation is constrained by linguistic factors, specifically pragmatic ones. (Author/VWL)