Revista Signos. Estudios de Lingüística

Del Valle, J. (2024). Lo político del lenguaje. Travesía por el español y sus malestares. Verba Volant Editores. ISBN: 978-956-08071-0-6. 165 páginas

Giohanny Olave Arias — 2025-08-01

¿En qué consiste aquello que podría señalarse como lo político en el lenguaje? ¿Es acaso una función del signo y la significación? ¿le es inherente, inevitable y simultánea? ¿O lo político se refiere mejor a un conjunto acotado de usos de la lengua? ¿O de efectos e implicaciones en el orden social? ¿No será el desplazamiento de una cierta posición o preferencia política desde los agentes hacia el lenguaje que usan, como un instrumento pretendidamente neutro? Esta cadena de interrogantes forma parte -pero no agota- los enormes problemas que surgen al vincular y estudiar de manera relacional lo lingüístico y lo político. El proyecto intelectual de José del Valle se ha dedicado a ese objeto particular en las últimas dos décadas. La publicación de Lo político del lenguaje. Travesía por el español y sus malestares avanza en ese camino y ofrece una retrospectiva de la trayectoria acumulada, a través del género ensayístico.

Critical training and sex education in the City of Buenos Aires: the politicization of pedagogical discourse

Gabriel Dvoskin — 2025-08-01

In this article, we analyze, from the approach of critical sociolinguistics, discursive practices developed in a high school Language and literature course, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, during the year 2022, in which gender and sexuality issues were problematized. Our research hypothesis is that the change of conjuncture in gender issues produced in Argentina in 2015, from the Ni Una Menos march and the wide dissemination of feminist discourses, had a strong impact on educational contexts, mainly by enabling in classroom practices the circulation of, on the one hand, gender issues that transcend the field of health and hygiene; and, on the other hand, perspectives from the social sciences and humanities. Consequently, the problematization of these issues in the classroom would bring with it a social, historical and political dimension, a fact that implies a change in the pedagogical models underlying educational practices and would contribute to the critical formation of students. The results obtained from the analysis of classroom interactions and the textbook used in the course allowed us to identify a series of particularities in these discursive practices that distance them from the hegemonic pedagogical discourse, such as dialogic openness, reversibility in classroom participation formats, appeal to students' beliefs and sensations, and polemic, characteristics more typical of political discourse and that contribute to the critical positioning of students with respect to the topics addressed in class.

Feedback in writing instruction in secondary education

Antonia García-Huidobro — 2025-08-01

This multiple case study seeks to describe the writing feedback practices in secondary education, of five Language Arts teachers from the Metropolitan Region of Chile. The participants in the sample worked in public and private schools with high- and low-achievement academic profiles. The analysis was carried out on a corpus of 71 students’ writing tasks, which included 2,188 coded comments. This description was further complemented with triangulation data from classroom observations and interviews. The results revealed similarities in the time elapsed between the submission and return. The most commonly used feedback technique was crossing out and rewriting, with a low frequency of modes that incorporated the process approach and metacognition. The focus of comments was on spelling, genre and punctuation. In addition, the comments of teachers from high achievement schools, both public and private, stood out for stimulating higher cognitive skills in their students.

Construction of an instrument for the assessment of narratives in Catalan Sign Language in the educational setting

Maria Josep Jarque — 2025-08-01

For deaf students enrolled in regular or specific educational centers with a bimodal bilingual educational project, sign language is the fundamental medium of instruction for learning and developing competencies. Despite the importance of knowing and assessing the development of linguistic competence, there are no available instruments to determine its progress in Catalan Sign language, and to make decisions regarding educational intervention. The purpose of the article is to discuss the construction and piloting process of NARVAL-LSC/EXP-LSC/Exp. The participants include 5 signing deaf adults and 9 children. The instrument adopts the rubric format. The results show its adequacy to assess the quality of the macro- and micro-structure aspects of signed narratives, as well as those linked to interaction, social cognition, and metalinguistic reflection.

The Historical-idiomatic Variational Space Between Communicative Immediacy and Communicative Distance and the Individual Level of Language

Araceli López Serena — 2025-08-01

The model of the historical-idiomatic variational space between communicative immediacy and communicative distance (h-i VS I-D model) outlined by Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher in 1990 is one of the most valuable theoretical contributions that German romanistics has made to general linguistic theory. Built on two important theoretical distinctions formulated by Eugenio Coseriu – the distinction between the universal, historical and individual levels of language and the differentiation between the diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic dimensions of intralinguistic historical variation –, its reception has, in many cases, been made regardless of Coserian linguistic theory; Hence, it has not always been realized that the differentiation between the historical and the individual level, as well as the conception of the h-i VS I-D model as a model of expressive knowledge and, therefore, of the individual level of language, are indispensable if a correct and truly productive interpretation of the model is to be achieved. This is precisely the purpose of the present paper: to lay the foundations for a correct interpretation of the h-i VS I-D model in the light of a purely Coserian reading of Koch and Oesterreicher's proposal. To this end, three of the most recent criticisms of the h-i VS I-D model are specifically discussed: (i) the questioning of the decision to grant the same theoretical status to the three types of diasystematic variation (diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic), (ii) the discussion of the legitimacy of conferring gradual marks to the phenomena of the diatopic dimension, and (iii) the controversy over the place that should correspond to the standard variety in the continuum between communicative immediacy and communicative distance.

Legal genres and lawyers’ training

Paulina Meza — 2025-08-01

This research aim is to establish the concordance between the type, frequency of production, and perceived level of difficulty of legal genres produced by law students during their academic training and by lawyers in their professional practice. We developed a quantitative-descriptive investigation with a non-random and intentional sample, made up of 336 voluntary participants (211 law students and 125 lawyers), who answered a questionnaire designed and validated for this study. Among the main results, in terms of frequency, the Contract is the genre most produced by lawyers; on the other hand, in the case of students, it is the Demand. Regarding the degree of difficulty, the most difficult genre for lawyers and students is the Jurisprudence Unification Resource. In conclusion, in general, lawyers produce a greater variety of genres than students and do so more frequently. In addition, a trend is identified that indicates that, both in the case of lawyers and students, the higher the production frequency reports, the lower the perceived difficulty reports, and vice versa. The study of legal genres addressed represents empirical evidence of the relationship between the training of lawyers and the requirements of professional life. Our results may be useful for the training of Law students, as well as for the improvement of practicing lawyers.

Detección de cognados verdaderos y false friends con word embeddings

Carlos Periñán-Pascual — 2025-08-01

Los cognados son palabras ortográficamente similares en distintas lenguas que tienen la misma etimología. La investigación de cognados es muy útil en lingüística histórica, adquisición de lenguas, recuperación de información y traducción automática, entre otras muchas áreas de investigación. En este contexto, la identificación de false friends supone un reto para los métodos automáticos de detección de cognados, ya que la similitud ortográfica no es suficiente para detectar estos pares de palabras. Con este fin, evaluamos siete modelos vectoriales-espaciales no supervisados diferentes basados en redes neuronales para detectar cognados en general y distinguir los cognados verdaderos de los false friends en particular a partir de una lista de pares de palabras en inglés y español. Esta variedad de modelos sirvió para determinar el impacto de varios factores en la calidad de los resultados y la eficacia de los modelos: los recursos lingüísticos empleados en la construcción del modelo (por ejemplo, corpus de textos, redes asociativas léxicas o ambos), la alineación interlingüística de los espacios semánticos y la fusión de significados en palabras polisémicas.

Evidence of variation in the mastery of German morphosyntax independent of learning strategies

Felipe von Hausen — 2025-08-01

Variation in second language acquisition (L2) has been extensively studied within the context of language teaching, yet less attention has been given to learners themselves and their specific learning processes. We investigated the relationship between German morphosyntax mastery and the use of learning strategies for German as an L2, using version 7 of the Oxford Strategy Inventory of Language Learning (1990, 2003) to measure the use of language learning strategies, and a C-Test by Arras et al. (2002) to assess morphosyntax mastery in 146 third-year secondary school students from three German schools in Chile. Analysis through mixed models revealed that the variability in C-Test items affected participants' results independently of the strategies used. We interpret our results as evidence that the complexity of particular morphosyntactic structures is more relevant for the acquisition of German as an L2 than the use of learning strategies. We discuss these results in the light of differences in the acquisition difficulty of various morphosyntactic structures.