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

The creation of Títulos de tierras began in the gobernación of Yucatan in the 16th century. In 1557, Don Francisco de Montejo Xiu, the halach uinic of the cúuchcabal de Maní, wanted to register its jurisdiction as a political entity under the Spanish regime and ordered the drafting of a document known today as the Título de tierras de Maní. Throughout the colonial period, this title was consulted several times, and the Cabildos also took traslados (i.e., copies), to use as part of their own land titles in order to defend their disputed lands. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to carry out a comparative analysis of the four known versions or texts of this Título and try to reflect on the meaning of noticeable differences in content to elucidate the intention of the Mayan scribes. In fact, this characteristic is understood, on the one hand, as an amendment or modification made by the scribes who tried to adapt the text to the specific needs of that time and, on the other, as a reflection of different acts to construct the very local “present” from the Título of 1557, on which the common “past” is based.

The presence and distribution of speakers of the Yucatekan Maya language in the Yucatan Peninsula from the early classic until the time of contact with the Spaniards are studied through an analysis of hieroglyphic inscriptions under the approaches of the theory of integrational semiotics. Since written language is a cultural product that serves as an alternative means of communication to the spoken language, a hypothesis that a language spoken in a certain geographical area tends to leave its particular features in the inscription code must consider, apart from linguistic aspects of the language under study, biomechanical, macrosocial and circumstantial factors that interfere in its graphic-visual manifestation. Complementing the advances of historical linguistics and epigraphy or grammatology in the field of Maya hieroglyphs with the linguistic, geographical, historical, cultural and social information documented in colonial sources, an integral proposal is elaborated for the process of the expansion of the speakers of the Yucatekan Maya language in pre-Hispanic times.

Although Yucatec Maya has a long history of written use compared to most indigenous languages, the widespread use of writing in day to day life and the development of an explicit standard writing system remain in their early stages. One important recent step in this process is the publication of a book –U nu’ukbesajil u ts’íibta’al maayat’aan / Normas de escritura para la lengua maya– presenting for the first time a comprehensive set of norms for writing in the language as well as motivating them, often by appeal to aspect of the language’s grammatical properties. This paper examines the relationship between grammar and standardization through a detailed case study of one particular norm: that the question mark not be used. While there may well be other countervailing factors besides grammar that justify the norm (e.g. tradition, a desire to create norms that differ from those of Spanish), we argue against the grammatical rationale for this norm through a detailed survey of interrogative and related constructions, showing that complex interactions between these various constructions validate the functional utility of the question mark for readers.

For centuries, linguistic description has been somehow limited because it was not possible to record audio and video. For this reason, the intrinsic multimodal nature of human language has been left out, putting aside various types of information both prosodic and visual. This work analyzes the ways in which gestures complement speech, taking into account several levels of analysis: pragmatic, semantic and syntactic; but also how some gestures can be considered linguistic signs. In order to exemplify the argumentation, I will consider the Yucatec Maya language using examples of spontaneous productions. Although certain processes presented in this work are specific to Yucatec Maya, most can be found in various languages. This paper first presents a definition of language, speech and gestures, and how one can study the way in which speech and gestures are integrated in a composite utterance. Subsequently, I analyze examples of different types of gestures in various areas of communication in Yucatec Maya, such as deictic gestures, the use of expressive gestures, metaphors and the integration of gestures at the pragmatic level. Finally, I explain how gestures can become linguistic signs in Yucatec Maya.

The concepts of variation, standardization and normalization are defined, adducing examples from different languages. These concepts are applied to Yucatec Maya, the book Normas de escritura para la lengua maya edited by Briceño Chel and Can Tec (2014) serving as a concrete and up-to-date example. In the critical discussion, it is shown what the purpose of standardization and what its theoretical basis is, which aspects of a language it applies to and how it is executed concretely. The discussion concludes with recommendations for the next edition of the Normas.

Manuel de Montolíu directed the Institute of Philology of the University of Buenos Aires in 1925, he was then a young Catalan philologist trained in linguistic geography and dialectology. In his agenda of conferences and academic activities, when he was in charge of the institution, was the development of a lexicographic work, entitled: Diccionario del habla popular argentina (literally, a ‘Dictionary of the argentine vernacular speech’), an unconcluded enterprise which would however become a renowned antecedent of ulterior studies in the field of dialectal variety description (Kovacci 2003; Barcia 2004). The initiative was accompanied by the incorporation of the idealistic approach as the theoretical model of the Institute, a process that will gradually be consolidated time later during the long administration of Amado Alonso (1927—1946) (Toscano y García 2011; Battista 2013a). Thanks to it, phenomena such as the contact of Spanish with native and immigrant languages, or the not cultured (or “popular”) varieties of the American Spanish, could then become part of the range of research topics of the Institute. In this paper, within the framework of linguistic historiography (Swiggers 2009), we analyze two groups of documents: on the one hand, a series of interventions with which Montolíu (1925a; 1925b; 1926a; 1926b) presented the work program that should give rise to the elaboration of the Dictionary; on the other hand, a series of communications given by three intellectuals of the argentine academic sphere —Almanzor Medina (1928), Arturo Costa Álvarez (1929b) and Vicente Rossi (1932)—, who, from outside the Institute, were critical of the Catalan philologist’s technical and modernizing insights, since they considered that his work still conceived the speech of Argentine people as a mere derivation of the learned Castilian norm.

It is widely known that there are Spanish speakers in the Mexican community who tend to omit the phoneme /d/ in postvocalic position at the end of words, for example, /verdad/, /universidad/, /salud/, etc. Despite the increasingly high amount of research which has investigated social variation in Hispanic groups, and the social stigma that this phenomenon carries, there is still no research discourse of the sociolinguistic variables that condition the elision of this phoneme. With the aim of filling this research gap, the present paper reports on a study that set out to explore the elision of the phoneme /d/ in postvocalic position at the end of words in the Spanish spoken in the city of Toluca, Mexico. This exploration involved examining its behaviour in relation to sociolinguistic variables, namely, gender, education level, and style shifting. The results indicate that the phoneme /d/ tends to be elided1) by speakers with low educational levels; 2) by men rather than women; and 3) in speech involving informal styles. Taken together, these findings suggest that this phenomenon is multifactorial and multidimensional.

In this paper, we analyze the external predications developed by some compound words in Spanish, commonly known as exocentric (Scalise & Guevara, 2006; Bauer, 2008). The main interest in this investigation is to uncover the nature of external predications; the concept of metonymy is used to achieve this goal. Based on previous research (Janda, 2011, Gutiérrez Rubio, 2014, Zacarías Ponce de León, 2015), we consider that external predication is a consequence of the use of these words to denominate entities from one of their prominent parts. The aim of this research is to establish a relationship between the class of compound and the selected types of metonymy. For this purpose, novel compound words from corpus Morfolex (2016) were analyzed in detail and sort regarding the external entities related, to find the preferred metonymic predications. It has been possible to identify correlations between different compositional structures and the types of metonymy selected.

The article analyzes the way in which the different varieties of Spanish are perceived by the Spanish speakers, according to their consideration as correct, incorrect and pleasant. Such notions are in direct relation to the status and solidarity and condition the linguistic attitudes that the speakers manifest. The data I am working with are part of the results obtained in the Pan-Hispanic project “Language Attitudes and Identity in Spanish America and Spain” (LIAS project), carried out during the years 2009 to 2012. Specifically, three of the questions that integrate the questionnaire applied in this project are analyzed.

The present paper aims to show current Huastec (teːnek) linguistic variation and its geographical distribution based on phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic features. First, it covers the framework known as linguistic geography (geolinguistics) and describes the methodology employed in this study, which is primarily descriptive. Secondly, it presents a discussion regarding previous Huastec dialectal groupings, and the need to go further into the study of its variations. The third part shows several maps that display the variations of the isoglosses, detailing the Western and Eastern dialects’ synchronic variation, as well as the linguistic data that support them. In the last section, the research focuses on the Central dialect (Tantoyuca), which has evolved independently from the other dialects at the phonological level, but which clearly shares morphological features with the Western dialect. These features are highly relevant in the grammar of the language, and vital to trace the recent history of the region.