Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Costa Rican literary historiography has been built from the convention that literature arises in the country from the second half of the 19th century. This article proposes a journey through the historical causes of such prejudice and through the disqualifying opinions of Costa Rican literary historians. It proposes the necessary foundation of a historiographical current that, from multidisciplinarity and from the exploration of little-known discursive genres, redefines the object of study of colonial literature. Finally, the necessary tasks for its constitution are postulated as a road map.

According to L. Hoeck and G. Genette’s considerations of the title as an element programming the reading process, as well as to M. Bajtin’s theoretical approach on discursive genres, and to Y. Lotman’s approach on literature as a secondary modelling system, this article proposes a new perspective at the comedy La Segua, written by Alberto Cañas, based on two of its structural elements: the prologue and the extra lines. According to our approach, the (pre)text of the legend of La Segua plays a delaying role in the significance process of the comedy, considering the initial phrase of the title: “la segua”, the reading centers on the possible recreation of the legend and omits the second approach of a generic nature that constitutes the entire title, and that enables a different point of view of the reading, as set out in this proposal.

This article analyzes the contributions of contrastive linguistics to second language teaching. First, through a brief historical overview, the role of this discipline in the development of language teaching methodologies is studied. Next, the most recent studies on interaction between languages when learning a new one are examined, and examples of the implementation of a contrastive perspective for teaching phonetics, morphosyntax and pragmatics in Spanish as a second language classroom are provided. Then, taking into account the benefits that can be derived from the interaction of the linguistic speaker’s repertoires, the concept of translanguaging is introduced, along with an analysis of its principles and some suggestions to implement it as a pedagogical practice, in this case, through the teaching of lexical and sociocultural components. Finally, this paper concludes that current second language methodologies suggest a multilingual approach that promotes the activation of previous knowledge and its integration into the social context in order to take advantage of the speaker’s linguistic repertoire.

What happens when a poet publicly dedicates a poem to another poet? This article answers this question by reviewing the classic tradition that, from an awareness of a fraternity between “soul mates”, makes the exchange of affections and feelings the expression of shared aspirations. Carrying out a public dedication highlights ideological and stylistic ties to create a political and ethical agenda. Nicaraguan poet Andira Watson does this by making a public tribute to her Costa Rican colleague Shirley Campbell. It is a context in which the Afro-Caribbean identity is highlighted in order to demonstrate her assumed and vindicated “sorority”.

In Costa Rican Spanish, as in other varieties, clitic sequences, with a final pronoun in singular indirect object, can accept a plural mark which refers anaphorically to a subject; this is the case, for example, “tienen que ponersen vivos”, where the {-n} agrees with the subject of the main sentence. This produces the effect of infinitive agreement, something that, in principle, is excluded by the morphology of non-finite forms in standard Spanish. In this article, we advocate a global approach to this type of plural, by putting it in relation to other similar structures.

This paper shows acoustic evidence of glottal stops before /p, t, k/ in syllable-final position and before vowels initially or between them in Limonese Creole English by analyzing some oscillograms and spectrograms of this language.