Showing papers in "Hispania in 1978"

Don Quijote de la Mancha

Abstract: Don Quijote de la Mancha is a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. First published under the title El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Honorable Don Quijote de la Mancha) at the beginning of 1605, it is one of the most outstanding works of Spanish and world literature, and one of the most widely translated. In 1615, the second part appeared, entitled El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote de la Manch). Don Quijote was the first work to genuinely demystify the knightly code of chivalry through its burlesque treatment. It represents the first literary work that can be classified as a modern novel and also the first polyphonic novel and, as such, had an enormous influence on all later European literature. Publishing rights available fromCompany: CENTURY PUBLISHERS S.L. CIF: B64958614 Address: FERRAN VALLS I TABERNER 3 Contact: santiago carroggio Phone: 932096620 E-mail: santiago@centurypublishers.es [3] Additional informationPrizes and reviews: Luxury edition in large format with over a hundred and forty specially commissioned illustrations by the renowned Latin American painter Ciro.

One Rule for the Spanish Subjunctive.

Abstract: A TREND which is emerging with increasing frequency in recent studies on the Spanish subjunctive is that of explaining the uses of this mode by as few principles or rules as possible.' The studies which represent this trend are based either on eclecticism (Bull and Da Silva) or generative grammar (Cressey, Lozano, and Shawl), including generative semantics (Goldin, Klein, Rivero, Terrell and Hooper, and Terrell). In contrast, studies and textbooks which are founded on structural linguistics give numerous rules for the use of the subjunctive." They list one or more rules for its occurrence in each of the four types of surface structure clauses, namely, independent clauses and dependent clauses, the latter being distinguished as to noun, adjective, and adverb clauses. Section 1 of this article is a survey of recent representative structural, eclectic, transformational, and semantic analyses of the subjunctive in independent and dependent clauses. I present my own treatment of the subjunctive in Section 2. This treatment differs from previous studies in that it formalizes the fact that there is but a single common rule for the use of the subjunctive and the indicative in all of their occurrences, both in independent or main clauses (exemplified in Section 3) and dependent clauses (Section 4). 1. A survey of recent studies on the subjunctive. Table 1 presents a compilation of the four well-known structural

A Simplified Approach for Teaching the Gender of Spanish Nouns

Abstract: O NE of the most challenging problems for students of Spanish who are native speakers of English is that of learning the gender of Spanish nouns (e.g., papel as masculine, nieve as feminine, testigo as ambivalent, etc.). This identification is, of course, grammatically important since it is the basis for the agreement of gendervariable adjectives and gender-variable determiners with nouns (el papel blanco, la blanca nieve, un testigo fidedigno, una testigo fidedigna). In fact, Stockwell et al.1 claim that, since the occurrence of gender is obligatory in all Spanish nouns but nonexistent in English nouns, it exemplifies the most difficult type of problem for a second-language learner. Accordingly, in their "Hierarchy of Difficulty" Stockwell et al., p. 285, list "gender" as the fifth most difficult feature of Spanish grammar for English-speaking students to master.

Reading in Early Childhood.

Abstract: The reading instruction experiment described in this report is based on the theory that, if a child learns to talk without formal instruction solely by being exposed to language and if written language is to be considered as an independent system, a child could learn to read at the same age and in the same way as he is learning to talk, solely by being exposed to written language. He would then attack the written material, forming hypotheses, building models, and discovering the code of the written language-7its morphemic, syntactic, and semantic systems. The author describes 14 months of work teaching a two-year old to read. Details of the procedures and the results are provided. After this period, the child is capable of storing, analyzing, and comparing written words and arrives at a knowledge of the grapho-phonemic correspondences that is a prerequisite for being able to decode any written message. (Authco:-/VM) Ragnhild Soderbergh: Reading in Early Childhood. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED 00 NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY This paper is a summary of my book "Readilig in Early Childhood. A Linguistic Study of a Swedish Preschool Child's Gradual Acquisition of Reading Ability" (Stockholm 1371). I have closely stud,d a ehiLd learning to read from the age of two years and four months by the method accounted for by Glenn Doman in his book "How to Teach Your Baby to Read" (New York 1964). By this method the child learns whole words as entities. I have shown how the child, as it learns more and more words, gradually breaks down these words into smaller units: first morphemes, then graphemes. At last the child arrives at an understanding of the correspondences between sound (phoneme) and letter (grapheme) and is able to read any new word through analysis and synthesis. In my experiment this stage is reached after 14 months of reading, i.e. when the child is three years and a half. The findings of this study have been viewed in the light of recent linguistic theorias as presented by research workers in child language inspired by Chomsky such as Brown, Bellugi and Lehneberg. Chapter One. Learning to read. Theories and methods confronted with different linguistic theories. In this chapter a short summary is given of the debate on reading in the USA in the 1950s. The authors main source here has been Jeanne Chall "Learning-to Read. The Great Debate" (New York 1967). According to Jeanne Chall there are-w theoretically two dominating methods in reading instruction, the phonics method and the reading-for-meaning method. In practice however there is often a mixture between the two. The pure phonics method implies that the pupil is taught the letters of the alphabet and the corresponding sounds. Then he is taught to read by "sounding and blending", i.e. he sunds out the new words and then synthesizes the sounds so that the right word is produced. The sponsors of the reading-for-meaning method oppose this as they think unnatural and boring way of reading and instead teach whole words and sentences from the very beginning, thus giving their pupils at once the experiende of what are the ultimate goals of reading: comprehension, appreciation and finnally application. In the pure phonics method the child is presented with the code and taught how to use itt. In the extreme reading-for-meaning method the child is not taught the code. Jeanne Chall has summarized the resUlts of recent research in England and the USA on methods in beginning reading and arrives at the folloving conclusions: "Early stress on code learning ... not only produces better word recognition and spelling, but also makes it easier for the child eventually to read with understanding" (Chall, p. 83). Chall gains support for the view that an early acquisition of the code is necessary also from the theoretical considerations of linguists, particularly Leonard Bloomfield and Charles C. Fries. These linguists, however, both consider written language as secondary to and completely dependent on spoken language. Bloomfield is apt to disregard written language altogether, from a scientific, linguistic point of view: "Writing is not language but merely a way of.recording language by means of visible marks" (Language, p. 21). Bloomfield was the linguistic pioneer of his time, and his views dominate the opinions of many linguists during the 1940s and 1950s. R,.cently, however, the written language has been considered an object worthy of investigation independently of the corresponding spoken language. There has been a strong tendency among linguists towards stressing the differences between the two codes, differences not only on the phonemic-graphemic level but also as regards morphemics and syntax. Linguists have even claimed that written language should be considered as a more or less independent system. (See Sture All6n, W. Nelson Francis, H.A. Gleason and H.J. Uldall). The current trend in linguistics represented by Chomsky and his school has more or less revolutionized the ideas about language learning and language acquisition. According to Chomsky we have a biologically founded innate capacity for language. This means that when a child is exposed to language he does not just imitate but attacks the language he is being exposed to, observing it and constructing hypotheses about it. He builds his own model of the language, woking out his own linguistic system consisting of sets of rules which are gross apiroximations of the correct system. As he is exposed to more and more linguistic material and as he is able to test his model by actual use of the rules when speaking, these rules are continually reconstructed and modified until, finally, the model becomes identical with the normal adult model. Chomsky's theories have been partly verified by many studies on child language presented during the 1960s, by Robert Brown, Ursula Bellugi, Colin Fraser, Paula Menyuk and others. Belief in the biological foundations of language has been convincingly advocated also by Lenneberg in a book so titled which appeared in 1967. According to Lenneberg it is undisputable that the oniet of speech and of certain linguistic abilities such as babbling, speaking isolated words, producing two word sentences etc. are determined by maturational processes (Lenneberg p. 127 f.). The maturational processes and the innate capacity that cause children to start learning to speak at a certain age (18-28 months) without any form of instruction the only recuirement being that they are exposed to language should also explain why this highly complicated learning process is being completed so quickly: within a period of two years all basic syntactic constructions of the language are mastered by the child. Now, if a child learns to talk at a certain age without formal instruction, solely by being exposed to language, and if written language is to be considered as an independent system, why cannot a child learn to read at the same age and in the same way as he is learning to talk, solely by being exposed to written language? He would then be supposed to attack the written material, forming hypotheses, building models,a1 1 by himselfdiscovering the code of the written language, of its morphematic, syntactic and semantic systems etc. That this is possible we know from the fact that some children learn to read "all by themselves", i.e. just by observing a text while listening to other people reading it. In a talk given at the annual meeting of American reading specialists in Boston, in April 1968, professor Arthur I. Gates, one of the foremost reading specialists in the United States, said that a recently finished investigation in the USA has shown that 80% of the children beginning school in the USA can read a certain number of words. There are also facts revealed in this investigation that hint at the pOssibility that very soon children will learn to read exactly in the same way as they now learn to understand and express themselves in spoken language, i.e. by living a normally active and verbal lifa. That children can learn to read at an early age without real instruction is well known, but how children sueceed in doing so has not yet been systematically studied. The chief interest then when the child is learning to read a language written with an alphabet must be centered on the following question: how does the child on its own discover the relations between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) Not until these correspondences are evident to the child, he can be said to have achieved full reading ability, i.e. to be able to read any word irrespectively of whether he has seen that word earlier or not.

The "Gracioso:" Toward a Functional Re-Evaluation

Abstract: D URING the past ten years there has been a veritabl "boom" in c itical studies of the Spanish Golden Age comedia. Literary histories, critical methodological statements, facsimile editions and "complete works" projects are all providing a new presentation, in English particularly, of the comedia's scope and depth.' Such a new presentation also allows for a concurrent re-evaluation of this genre's component parts.2 Since the full flowering of our target genre occurred in the early 17th century, it is perhaps understandable that most in-depth studies have focused on that time frame. But as further analytical scrutiny is generated and appropriate origins and precursors are again noted, it will be evident that the sixteenth century is especially in need of studies which go beyond the purely historical or chronological. To this adjacent formative period of the comedia which is the late sixteenth century should be applied the critical improvements derived from study of the seventeenth century Spanish theater. The present study seeks to add balance to our awareness of both centuries of the Golden Age by concentrating on one of the comedia's most notably developed characters and, consequently, one of its most significant building-blocks: the gracioso. The sixteenth century is important not so much for the number of plays produced as for the wide experimentation which permitted a later blending of the various components in the seventeenth century comedia. One of these components is the gracioso, or pre-gracioso, as he should more properly be designated. Criticism has defined the gracioso type in terms of his classical background, his humorous disposition and his influence on subsequent comic stage types. Without denying the validity of those early definitions, I would suggest that the importance of the pastor, bobo or introiter goes significantly beyond them. The recent work of D. Gustafson regarding the roles of the shepherd in the theater of Diego Sanchez de Badajoz'3 points in this new direction. If the gracioso and galdn later make that "pareja ideal" that Montesinos wrote of in 1925,4 it would seem that more attention should have subsequently fallen on the gracioso type as a vital structural component. It is the purpose here to suggest that, in our continuing effort to refine techniques of comedia criticism, the contribution of functional or structural analysis be reaffirmed. Specifically, I wish to comment on the relationship of the gracioso to the medieval "feast of fools" tradition. The a-social or unprincipled nature of the gracioso figure and the dramatist-as-actor are important corollary considerations.

The Emergence of the Latin American Novel

Abstract: Preface introduction 1. Settings and people 2. America's magic forest: Miguel Angel Asturias 3. The genesis of America: Alejo Carpentier 4. Survival in the sullied city: Juan Rulfo 6. Intellectual geography Juilo Cortazar 7. Tupac Amaru dismembered: Jose Maria Arguedas 8. Social structures 9. An end to secular solitude: Gabriel Garcia Marquez 10. A permanent home? Notes Index.

Spain's Golden Age Culture and the "Comedia"

Abstract: IN a recent article' I proposed a philosophic basis for the Comedia. The article was meant to be exploratory and to offer a method-and a set of norms-for the Comedia's interpretation. It was found convenient to use for the purpose the philosophic system developed by the American thinker James K. Feibleman. This system, which Feibleman labels "axiologic realism," has elements that are akin to those of the basic philosophy of Catholicism; this relationship facilitates an effort to interpret the Comedia, since in its own way it is a vehicle for the expression of Spain's Catholic culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.