Maintenance or loss of dialect Andalusian features: Internal and external factors

In the last sixty years a steadily maintained process of convergence towards the Castilian national standard has been occurring in Southern Spain affecting urban middle-class speakers’ varieties, particularly phonology and lexis. As a consequence, unmarked features characterising innovative southern pronunciation have become less frequent and, at the same time, certain standard marked features have been adapted to the southern phonemic inventory. Then, urban middle-class varieties have progressively been stretching out the distance separating them from working-class and rural varieties, and bringing them closer to central Castilian varieties. Intermediate, yet incipient koineised varieties have been described including also transitional Murcia and Extremadura dialects (Hernández & Villena 2009, Villena, Vida & von Essen 2015). (1) Some of the standard phonologically marked features have spread out among southern speakers exclusively based on their mainstream social prestige and producing not only changes in obstruent phoneme inventory –i.e. acquisition of /s/ vs. /θ/ contrast, but also standstill and even reversion of old consonant push- or pull-chain shifts –e.g. /h/ or /d/ fortition, affricate /ʧ/, etc. as well as traditional lexis shift (Villena et al. 2016). Internal (grammar and word frequency) and external (stratification, network and style) factors constraining those features follow similar patterns in the Andalusian speech communities analysed so far (Granada, Malaga) but when we zoom in on central varieties, which are closer to the national standard and then more conservative, differences in frequency increase and conflict sites emerge. (2) Unmarked ‘natural’ phonological features characterising southern dialects, particularly deletion of syllable-final consonant, do not keep pace with this trend of convergence towards the standard. Thus a combination of southern innovative syllable-final and standard conservative onset-consonant features coexist. (3). The main idea is that this intermediate variety is formed through changes suggesting that Andalusian speakers look for the best way of accepting marked prestige features without altering coherence within their inventory. Either reorganisation of the innovative phonemic system in such a way that it may include Castilian and standard /s/ vs. /θ/ contrast or re-syllabification of aspirated /s/ before dental stop are excellent examples of how and why linguistic features are able to integrate intermediate varieties between the dialect-standard continuum.

Revisiting the origin and development of pleonastic that in English

The origin of pleonastic that can be traced back to Old English where it could appear in syntactic constructions consisting of a preposition + demonstrative pronoun (i.e. for þy þat, for þæm þe) or a subordinator (i.e. oþ þat). Its diffusion with other subordinators is considered an early Middle English development as a result of the standardization of this item as the general subordinator in the period, which motivated its use as a pleonastic word in combination with all kinds of conjunctions (i.e. now that, gif that, when that, etc.) and prepositions (i.e. before that, save that, in that). Its use considerably increased in late Middle English, declining throughout the 17th century. The list of subordinating elements includes relativizers (i.e. this that), adverbial relatives (i.e. there that) and a number of subordinators (i.e. after, as, because, before, beside, for, if, since, sith, though, until, when, while, etc.). The present paper pursues the following objectives: a) to analyse the use and distribution of pleonastic that in a corpus of early English medical writing (in the period 1375-1700); b) to classify the construction in terms of the two different varieties of medical texts, i.e. treatises and recipes; and c) to assess the decline of the construction with the different conjunctive words. The data used as sources of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e. Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375-1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500-1700).

Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile in its westernmost biogeographical limit (northwestern Alboran Sea): Meadows characterisation, phenology and flowering events

Posidonia oceanica is a Mediterranean endemic seagrass species that forms meadows covering ca. 2.5–4.5 millions of hectares, representing ca.25 % of the infralittoral and shallow circalittoral (down to 50m) bottoms of the Mediterranean. This seagrass is considered a habitat-engineer species and provides an elevated number of ecosystem services. In addition the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, 2008/56/EC) includes seagrass like elements to evaluate the “Good Environmental Status” of the European coasts. Information about their phenological characteristic and structure of the meadows is needed for indicator estimations in order to establish their conservation status. The studied meadows are located in the westernmost limit of the P. oceanica distribution (North-western Alboran Sea) in the vecinity of the Strait of Gibraltar, an Atlantic-Mediterranean water transition area. Four sites were selected from East to West: Paraje Natural de Acantilados de Maro-Cerro Gordo (hereafter Maro), Special Area of Conservation “Calahonda” (hereafter Calahonda), Site of Community Importance Estepona (hereafter Estepona) and Punta Chullera (hereafter Chullera) where P. oceanica present their westernmost meadows. Phenological data were recorded from mid November to mid December in P. oceanica patches located at 2 – 3 m depth. At each site three types of patches (patch area <1m2, small patches; 1-2 m2, medium patches and >2 m2, large patches) were sampled. At each patch and site, 3 quadrants of 45 x 45 cm were sampled for shoot and inflorescences density measurements. In each quadrant, 10 random shoots were sampled for shoot morphology (shoot height and number of leaves). Shoot and inflorescences densities were standardized to squared meters. All the studied P. oceanica meadows develop on rocks and they present a fragmented structure with a coverage ranging between ca. 45% in Calahonda and Estepona and ca. 31% in Maro. The meadows of Chullera are reduced to a few small - medium patches with areas ranging between 0.5-1.5 m2 (Fig. 1). The meadows of Chullera and Estepona presented similar values of shoot density (ca. 752 – 662 shoots m-2, respectively) and leaf height (ca. 25 cm). Similarly, the Calahonda and Maro meadows also showed similar values of shoot density (ca. 510 – 550 shoots m-2, respectively) but displaying lower values than those of sites located closer to the Strait of Gibraltar. Regarding patch sizes and leaf height, the longest leaves (ca. 25 cm) were found in medium and large patches, but the number of leaves per shoot were higher in the small and the medium size patches (ca. 6.3 leaves per shoot). Flowering was only detected at the Calahonda meadows with maximum values of ca. 330 inflorescences m-2 (115.2 ± 98.2 inflorescences m-2, n= 9; mean ± SD) (Fig.1). Inflorescence density was not significant different among patches of different sizes. In the Alboran Sea and unlike the studied meadows, extensive beds of P. oceanica occur at the National Park of Cabo de Gata (northeastern Alboran Sea), but from east to west (Strait of Gibraltar), meadows are gradually fragmenting and their depth range decrease from 30m to 2m depth between Cabo de Gata and Chullera, respectively. Probably, the Atlantic influence and the characteristic oceanographic conditions of the Alboran Sea (i.e., higher turbidity, higher water turbulence) represent a developmental limiting factor for P. oceanica at higher depths. Similarities between the meadows located closer to Strait of Gibraltar (Chullera and Estepona) were detected as well as between those more distant (Calahonda and Maro). The first ones showed higher values of shoot densities and leaf heights than the formers, which could be relating to the higher hydrodynamic exposure found at Chullera and Estepona meadows. Regarding flowering events, sexual reproduction in P. oceanica is not common in different locations of the Mediterranean Sea. The available information seems to indicate that flowering represent an irregular event and it is related to high seawater temperature. In fact, the flowering episodes that occurred in Calahonda in November 2015, match with the warmest year ever recorded. This is the third flowering event registered in these meadows located close to the westernmost distributional limit of P. oceanica (Málaga, Alboran Sea), which could indicates that these meadows presents a healthy status. Furthermore, the absence of significant differences in relation to inflorescence density between patches of different sizes may be indicating that the fragmentation does not necessarily influence on the flowering of this seagrass species.