Bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) are constructions where an inflected light verb from one language co-occurs with an inserted lexical verb from another language, which provides the semantic content,...Show moreBilingual compound verbs (BCVs) are constructions where an inflected light verb from one language co-occurs with an inserted lexical verb from another language, which provides the semantic content, e.g., Spanish/English hacer cook “to cook”: Spanish/Maya hacer loch “to hug”. Although previous studies, i.a., Balam (2015); Balam et al. (2020); Michalski (2017), have analyzed the (morpho)syntactic structure of hacer “to do” BCVs in Spanish/English code-switching and Maya/Spanish code-switching respectively, there is no study that offers a semantic analysis of these innovative constructions in these bilingual varieties. Endeavoring to fill this gap, the present study examines the semantic use of BCVs in Orange Walk, Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico; two linguistically and sociohistorically connected yet distinct communities where Spanish hacer BCVs have been attested (e.g., Balam, 2015; Michalski, 2017). More specifically, we analyzed which semantic domains are open to other language lexical verbs in these two bi/multilingual communities that markedly differ in terms of their frequency of use of BCVs. 903 BCVs from Balam ́s (2016a) corpus of oral production data from Northern Belize and 237 BCVs from Michalski ́s (2021) Yucatan Spanish Twitter corpus were coded using our categorization model, consisting of 3 mains semantic categories, 28 mutually exclusive categories and 5 references to identity. Results show that there are significant similarities and differences regarding the openness of semantic domains to other language lexical verbs in the two communities. In terms of similarities, subcategories “C1 School, Education, Learning-Related” and “B2 Friendships, Social Communication” evinced high levels of openness (> 7%) across the two communities. In terms of differences, the BCVs from Yucatan encapsulated a relatively high degree of cultural and linguistic references (47%) that are idiosyncratic to the Yucatecan/Mayan community. We therefore posit that Backus ́s (2001) concept of specificity and Treffers-Daller ́s (2023) listedness to be the main motivations for the insertion of Maya verbs in hacer BCVs. The Belize results demonstrate that many different semantic contexts exhibited openness to English verb insertions, reflecting the multicultural and multilingual identity of the Northern Belizean society. The high degree of openness found in “C1 School, Education, Learning-Related” (20%) and “C2 Work-Related”(13%) can be attributed to the more frequent (official) use of English in educational and professional settings, possibly resulting in higher levels of “entrenchment” in the speakers´minds (Backus, 2014).Show less
This thesis aims to analyze the extent to which agency of unaccompanied children in transit is fostered at the US-Mexico border between 2009-2020. Firstly, the concept of agency in child migration...Show moreThis thesis aims to analyze the extent to which agency of unaccompanied children in transit is fostered at the US-Mexico border between 2009-2020. Firstly, the concept of agency in child migration will be defined. Secondly, an analysis of the social, political, and legal context will provide insight into the current situation of unaccompanied children at the border. Finally, a thematic analysis of a corpus of Mexican and US case law, state policy reviews and NGO reports will reveal the experiences of unaccompanied children at the border. These findings on agency will be supported by a small case study of an individual narrative. The results of the analysis give evidence that unaccompanied children are caught in an agency-repressive cycle. Due to the violations of children’s rights by the US and Mexico, unaccompanied children’s agency is not fostered at the border. Moreover, children’s expressions of agency lead to diminished acknowledgment of their vulnerability, which results in reduced access to rights for unaccompanied children.Show less
As the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) studies several times in Paris with European avant-garde artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955), it is often claimed that Amaral’s visual...Show moreAs the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) studies several times in Paris with European avant-garde artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955), it is often claimed that Amaral’s visual style tends to cubism. However, throughout Amaral’s career as a painter, she sought ways to distinguish herself and to break away from European dominance. She dedicated herself to painting the local Brazilian landscape aiming at the revaluation of Brazil’s cultural and social features. Due to rapid industrialization and urbanization, urban life became a dominant topic among modernists. To embody the process of Brazil’s search for breaking away from European dominance, Oswald de Andrade excogitated the theory of Anthropophagy. The use of anthropophagy as a cultural metaphor is a way to visualize the process of the elimination of colonial domination. The present study is a visual analysis of paintings from Amaral and Léger which depict objects from urban life analyzed through the lens of the Anthropophagic theory. The research question is: How does Tarsila do Amaral adopt a decolonial aesthetic in relation to Fernand Léger in the representation of urban life?Show less
This thesis summarises the actions included in Ecuadorian governmental programmes concerning oil extractivism on the territories of indigenous communities. Moreover, it identifies the different...Show moreThis thesis summarises the actions included in Ecuadorian governmental programmes concerning oil extractivism on the territories of indigenous communities. Moreover, it identifies the different approach of the indigenous communities towards the land they live on, versus the economically driven approach of the government. As the indigenous population is significant in Ecuador, the government had (and has) no choice but to take their requests regarding the conservation of nature into account. By examining the reaction of the indigenous people following proposals for rules and regulation concerning extractive activities and the conservation of indigenous occupied land, one can be able to understand how the indigenous people perceive extractivism. It is important to try to understand whether the indigenous population perceive extractivism as a ‘resource curse’ or as a ‘resource blessing’.Show less
Previous studies (Jensen, 1989) (Börestam Uhlmann, 1994) (Zeevaert, 2004) (Gooskens et al., 2018) have attempted to establish intelligibility between cognate or sister languages - languages...Show morePrevious studies (Jensen, 1989) (Börestam Uhlmann, 1994) (Zeevaert, 2004) (Gooskens et al., 2018) have attempted to establish intelligibility between cognate or sister languages - languages descending from a common ancestral language. But what happens to intelligibility when those languages are not only related but are a direct continuation such as descendant languages or a creoles? This thesis attempts to establish the intelligibility of Papiamentu as an Iberian-based creole language among native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese. By means of a cloze test (Aitken, 1977) performed online and distributed through social media, participants were asked to look at three written texts and listen to three audio fragments, each with certain words missing for which the participants had to select replacements through multiple choice. Participants were sorted into different categories in order to establish whether the order of performed tasks had any impact on the end results. Additionally, participants were asked to self-assess their performance at the end of each task. Results showed that Spanish speakers generally performed better at the reading task, while Portuguese speaking participants scored better during the listening task. Overall, the Portuguese speakers had the highest scores. The order in which tasks were performed also impacted the scores, with those who performed the listening task first scoring higher than those who performed the tasks in the reversed order.Show less
In this thesis the Spanish-English code-switching in the book "Killer Crónicas" is analyzed. Various functions of code-switching, such as Local and Global functions, are discussed and considered...Show moreIn this thesis the Spanish-English code-switching in the book "Killer Crónicas" is analyzed. Various functions of code-switching, such as Local and Global functions, are discussed and considered with code-switching in the book, in order to determine the function of code-switching here. The thesis concludes that code-switching in Killer Crónicas serves multiple functions, both Local and Global.Show less
An analysis of holistic sustainability of the Brazilian sugarcane supply chain for the production of biofuels for the usage in the commercial aviation industry.
This thesis is an assessment on sustainable tourism during the Olympic Games of 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. The thesis uses the Triple Bottom Line to research sustainability and sustainable tourism...Show moreThis thesis is an assessment on sustainable tourism during the Olympic Games of 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. The thesis uses the Triple Bottom Line to research sustainability and sustainable tourism during the Games.Show less
This study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement between determiner- noun-adjective by Spanish L2 speakers whose L1 is Dutch, and tests the effect of language proficiency by comparing...Show moreThis study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement between determiner- noun-adjective by Spanish L2 speakers whose L1 is Dutch, and tests the effect of language proficiency by comparing beginner- intermediate- advanced Dutch speakers of Spanish. Earlier research on second language acquisition, like research on the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Hwang and Lardiere 2013; Lardiere 2009) that states that acquisition of uninterpretable features like grammatical gender pose difficulty, together with the differences between languages when it comes to their gender systems, have led to this study. Both Dutch and Spanish have grammatical gender with a binary system. This system is particularly transparent in Spanish gender, since nouns ending in –o tend to be masculine and nouns ending in –a feminine. Whereas in Dutch the gender system is less transparent, based on common gender (de) or neuter gender (het). Given this background, how is the acquisition of gender agreement between determiner- noun- adjective by Spanish L2 speakers whose L1 is Dutch? Comparing beginner, intermediate and advanced Dutch L2 learners of Spanish, which has been done in earlier investigations on English L2 learners of Spanish (Sagarra and Herschensohn 2011), gives us an insight on the effect of proficiency. I used the Leiden Learner Corpus (LLC), a collection of data from Dutch learners of Romance languages to extract determiner- noun-adjective combinations, produced by Dutch speaking participants who are studying Spanish as their L2 or L3 at Leiden University (n= 27; 10 beginners, 6 intermediate and 11 advanced). An overall better performance on gender agreement by higher proficiency levels was found. The performance on gender agreement between determiner- noun was better than the performance on gender agreement between determiner- noun- adjective. This research creates a new angle on the acquisition of gender agreement between the determiner- noun- adjective structure because it is the first study on a new language pair: Dutch- Spanish.Show less
Lynchings became a common practice in Guatemala after the signing of the peace accords in 1996.Since lynching has become a source of serious concern in post-war Guatemala, it is of vital importance...Show moreLynchings became a common practice in Guatemala after the signing of the peace accords in 1996.Since lynching has become a source of serious concern in post-war Guatemala, it is of vital importance that the underlying causes of this phenomenon receive a more profound analysis, in order to discern, and consequently address, the root causes of this issue. Due to the often complex and multi-causal nature of violence it is imperative that these problems be tackled from a similar multifaceted perspective. However, the incidence and geographical dispersion of lynching in Guatemala provide clues as to possible factors and conditions of interest as focal points for further analysis.The central hypothesis of this thesis is that widespread loss of social capital and the profound alteration of fundamental social and communal relations have left communities vulnerable to ‘frontier’ practices such as vigilantism and lynching. In the absence of a strong and capable legitimate power, the democratic transition left rural and marginalised communities isolated in an already volatile political and security situation, while pre-existing social disjunctions persisted. In an attempt to re-establish order in a context of psychosocial and collective trauma, perched on the razor’s edge of a near-defunct legal system, violence remained as the only tool in their armoury to settle conflict, exert social control, and impose moral authority.Show less
Objectives: This thesis is a replication study of previous work on Spanish-English code-switching (Stadthagen-González, Parafita Couto, Párraga and Damian, 2017) and focuses on comparative...Show moreObjectives: This thesis is a replication study of previous work on Spanish-English code-switching (Stadthagen-González, Parafita Couto, Párraga and Damian, 2017) and focuses on comparative judgments, with regard to adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switched utterances. It examines the predictions of adjective-noun order derived from two different theoretical models: the Minimalist Program (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009) and the Matrix Language Framework (Myers-Scotton, 2002). In Dutch, adjectives are prenominal, like ‘zwarte hond’ (‘black dog’), whereas in Papiamento, adjectives are mostly post-nominal, as in ‘kachó pretu’ (literally: ‘dog black’). The Matrix Language Framework (MLF) posits that the word order in code-switched sentences must follow the word order of the Matrix Language (determined by finite verb morphology) (Myers-Scotton, 2002). However, according to Cantone and MacSwan (2009) within the Minimalist Program (MP), the word order depends on the adjective’s language. Methodology and analysis: To evaluate these predictions, 10 monolingual base sentences were modified into 40 code-switched items, consistent with the MP, the MLF, with both or none of the theoretical models. Data was gathered by a 2-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) task, concentrating explicitly on switches in adjective-noun word order and was analysed using Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment (Thurstone, 1927). Conclusions: Results of the thirty-seven bilinguals that participated in this experiment, indicate that both the language of the verb as well as the language of the adjective are used to determine word order in code-switched sentences and these results do not differ much from those of the similar study regarding Spanish-English bilinguals (Stadthagen-González et.al., 2017). Evidence showed that neither of the two theoretical models can fully account for the acceptability of adjective-noun switches. Implications: A suggestion would be to combine the insights of both the Minimalist Program and the Matrix Language Framework to be able to understand grammaticality in code-switching, as already proposed by Stadthagen-González et.al., (2017).Show less
Racism and inequality are present in Brazilian society. In order to raise awareness of the fact that this is a problem, which needs more attention, this subject can be investigated in different...Show moreRacism and inequality are present in Brazilian society. In order to raise awareness of the fact that this is a problem, which needs more attention, this subject can be investigated in different ways. One of these ways is from a linguistic perspective and more specifically through Discourse Analysis. Discourse Analysis focuses on social problems and this method is used to analyze the narratives of black Brazilian YouTubers in order to show that racism and prejudice against black Brazilians is still very common and it can be actually seen on YouTube. For the black community of Brazil, YouTube is primarily used as a means to share their stories and personal experiences regarding racism and prejudice with the outside world. Besides, it is also a way to connect with other people who are also suffering from these social problems. When analyzing their narratives, this thesis will use a structure, invented by, among others, William Labov, a sociolinguist. This structure is called the personal experience narrative (PEN) structure and supports a strong analysis.Show less
