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

This article analyses turn taking strategies used by a non native Spanish speaker during a conversation with native speakers. This study is based on the premise that the different turn taking mechanisms as well as the different communicative roles assumed by the speaker must be studied in the Spanish as a second language class, since they play a fundamental role in communicative competence development.

The project Teclado Chibcha was designed to overcome the technical difficulties that face the indigenous people from Costa Rica, and in general the people interested in the study of their native languages, to write in digital media. The application allows stacking the diacritics used by the practical alphabets of the bribri and cabécar languages; all this thanks to the open font Charis SIL and a keyboard layout to facilitate the introduction of these characters in the operating system Windows. The result is a tool of easy installation that solves a technical problem with deep cultural and educational implications.

This article analyses the experiential metafunction realized in the material clauses of Bribri (Coroma’s variation) according to Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar (2004). The main objective is to describe the codification of material processes and their associated participants through the analysis of five Bribri texts. Since processes and participants are part of the TRANSITIVITY system (which includes the TYPE OF PROCESS and AGENCY subsystems), the present study describes this system

In Vies imaginaires (Imaginary Lifes), the French writer Marcel Schwob wrote biographies of 22 marginal characters based on the great historical narratives. Attention to the secondary details, freedom from the veracity of the facts and assimilation between life and work of the writers included in the book are some of the features of an aesthetic model that the Mexican writer Juan Jose Arreola endorses. From two texts by Arreola (“Nabonides” and “Epitafio”) and based on general considerations about the literary forms involved in the works of both writers –literary portrait and votive epigram– this article focuses this process of rewriting as an act of appropriation and self-understanding through the understanding of others

In this essay we discuss the sequelae experienced by the Cuban refuge in the United States. We analyze these consequences in terms of his cultural and linguistic identity, the psychological and existential effects as well as his way of dressing. Within this last section we examine the protagonist-narrator?s overcoat, since this garment becomes the leit-motif of the novel and without the vestiment Montes Huidobro?s text would not exist.

Charles Nodier, pioneer writer of the fantastic narrative in France, transfers biblical images into his stories. The transposed image is studied in parallel with the original image. This analysis explores from a comparative approach the intersections of literary narrative, the transposition of biblical images and the results of the insertion of those modified images in a new network of meaning. The intertextuality generated from this exchange, favors the creation of a new cosmogony that without hesitation incorporates the biblical world, proposing a new interpretation of the supernatural cosmos.

In this article the first acoustic analysis on Limonese Creole English (Costa Rica) has been carried out. The acoustic analysis of several spectrograms shows unequivocally that vowel length is a phonetic distinctive trait in this language.

This article presents a selection of main lexicographic works that includes sexual taboo vocabulary in Costa Rican Spanish. A chronology of these works is shown, it points out the differences between them, and two periods for its study are proposed.

Because of his political afiliation to the Socialist Party, the Canarian poet Domingo López Torres (1910-1937) was murdered in the beginnings of the Civil War after spending some months imprisonned. His compromise was not only political but also literary. Being an enemy of every type of tradicionalism, he sympathized with those renovative aesthetical tendencies that wanted to introduce the most progressist styles, ideas and conducts of 1930s Europe, which made him crucial in the process of reception of Surrealism in the island of Tenerife. This article describes López Torres’ gradual approach to the avant-garde movement led by André Breton. His two main works are analized with this aim:  Diario de un sol de verano and Lo imprevisto, both inedit until 1987 and 1981 respectively. While the first volume, written around 1928, connects with the principles of Ultraism, with the Regionalism proposed by his fellow countryman Pedro García Cabrera, with Juan Ramón Jimenez’s “Pure Poetry” or with Lorca’s and Alberti’s neopopulist facets, the second one, composed in the prison of Fyffes, just before he died, reveals the use of openly surrealistic procedures and images

The following article examines exclusion based on predominant types of identity as a means of violence that sometimes is hidden, obscured, or blurred in discourse. In this case, the manifestations of this type of violence are explored taking into consideration the effects of the European modernity and the colonial processes in the Central American region. In addition, violence is evidenced in texts written by two writers with the aim of revealing the ways of representing exclusion in the post-revolutionary period in El Salvador. Both the literary devices and the style employed by these authors are associated to the systems of degradations discussed by Mijail Bajtín and they illustrate, in diverse ways, the subjectivity of this Central American country.