Diferencias en las atribuciones académicas en lengua en base al efecto positivo

La finalidad de esta investigación residió en conocer si los individuos pertenecientes a población infantil española con altas puntuaciones en Afecto Positivo (AP) poseían diferencias estadísticamente significativas con los individuos con bajas puntuaciones en AP en las seis dimensiones que componen las atribuciones académicas en el área de Lengua (Éxito: capacidad, esfuerzo y causas externas; Fracaso: capacidad, esfuerzo y causas externas). La muestra estaba compuesta por 862 estudiantes, entre 8 y 11 años. Se utilizó la subescala de lengua de la Sydney Attribution Scale (SAS) y la subescala de AP del Positive And Negative Affect Schedule for Children (PANAS-C) versión reducida. La prueba t de Student reflejó que los participantes con altos niveles de AP obtuvieron medias significativamente más altas en la atribución al éxito y al fracaso en Lengua a causas externas. Por otro lado, los sujetos con bajas puntuaciones en AP obtuvieron medias significativamente más altas en la atribución del fracaso en Lengua a la capacidad y al esfuerzo. Los resultados obtenidos complementan la literatura previa existente y dejan la posibilidad a seguir ampliando el campo del conocimiento del afecto y de las atribuciones académicas.

Semantic change and intersubjectification: The origin of reprise evidential conditional in Old Catalan

The reprise evidential conditional (REC) is nowadays not very usual in Catalan: it is restricted to journalistic language and to some very formal genres (such as academic or legal language), it is not present in spontaneous discourse. On the one hand, it has been described among the rather new modality values of the conditional. On the other, the normative tradition tended to reject it for being a gallicism, or to describe it as an unsuitable neologism. Thanks to the extraction from text corpora, we surprisingly find this REC in Catalan from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the contemporary age, with semantic and pragmatic nuances and different evidence of grammaticalization. Due to the current interest in evidentiality, the REC has been widely studied in French, Italian and Portuguese, focusing mainly on its contemporary uses and not so intensively on the diachronic process that could explain the origin of this value. In line with this research, that we initiated studying the epistemic and evidential future in Catalan, our aim is to describe: a) the pragmatic context that could have been the initial point of the REC in the thirteenth century, before we find indisputable attestations of this use; b) the path of semantic change followed by the conditional from a ‘future in the past’ tense to the acquisition of epistemic and evidential values; and c) the role played by invited inferences, subjectification and intersubjectification in this change.

Forgiven, not Forgotten: Communicative Translation Activities in Second Language Teaching

Although frequently discarded and despised in the 20th century, translation now seems to find wider acceptance within the Second Language Teaching (SLT) field. However, it still has a long way to go before recovering its due place in the L2 classroom. The aim of this paper is to suggest a number of translation (and interpreting)-based activities covering the different competence levels, thus showing that communicative content and translation can perfectly go hand in hand so that old, unjustified prejudices can be superseded once and for all.