Filología

Preliminares

Guiomar Elena Ciapuscio — 2025-07-18

Impact of Rodolfo Walsh’s crime fiction translations in Operation massacre (1957): the Cornell Woolrich / William Irish case

Sebastián Franklin Henríquez — 2025-07-17

Rodolfo Walsh’s translation work in crime fiction prior to the publication of Operación masacre (1957) has received little critical attention despite the fact that translation in general was the main mechanism for the incorporation of new literary models to the local repertoire at the time. In this work we will focus on Walsh’s productive and central use in Operación masacre of the formulas and techniques of suspense literature or “victim novel” learned from his translations of Cornell Woolrich / William Irish, of whom Walsh was the main translator into Spanish. Our approach will also seek to establish the points of productive convergence between the main characteristics of this translated suspense literature and some of Walsh’s rhetorical and political objectives in that book.

Recursos y marcadores de la indescriptibilidad

Andreína Adelstein — 2025-07-17

Facets of Indescribability: The Case of COVID 19 Narratives

Guiomar Elena Ciapuscio — 2025-07-17

The difficulty of expressing or describing through language (the unsayable or the indescribable) has been a relatively overlooked topic in the field of linguistics until quite recently, despite being a frequent and relevant experience in various communicative situations. In this paper, I first aim to present some contributions and discussions that have taken place within the framework of conversational analysis in the German language (Gülich, 2020), specifically focused on the study of conversations between doctors and patients suffering from epilepsy. Secondly, building on this foundation, I seek to delve into and shed light on some of the different facets of indescribability, drawing on reflections based on lexicographic resources and, fundamentally, on the analysis of various illness narratives produced by Rioplatense Spanish speakers suffering from COVID 19. The qualitative and exemplary analysis, guided by the theoretical-methodological developments of a particular approach to discourse analysis with a linguistic imprint (Gülich and Kotschi, 1995; Gülich, 2007), allows for the proposition that indescribability, understood both as a formulation resource and as a generic characteristic, could be considered a predominant attribute of these narratives about the experience of suffering from COVID 19, a thesis that should be tested on a larger corpus.

“Comme un trou noir”. Testimonies of Sexual Abuse and the Challenge of the Inexpressible. Linguistic Strategies and Resources

Federico Bustos Bonacci — 2025-07-17

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of the inexpressible in testimonies from victims of sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church in France. Based on a corpus of four transcripts published by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), we explore the linguistic strategies used by the subjects to verbalize traumatic experiences suffered during childhood. Drawing on discourse analysis and studies on the description of traumatic experiences, our study shows that the inexpressible does not equate to absolute silence, but rather reveals a discursive struggle in which language proves insufficient when faced with the horror experienced. Among the linguistic markers identified, we highlight reformulations, explanatory glosses, deictic ambiguities, enunciative shifts, and analogies, all of which disclose an intense enunciative effort. These strategies, far from representing communicative failures, underscore the tension between the desire to testify and the structural limits of language. We conclude that testimony is not only an act of memory or denunciation but also a process of symbolic negotiation, in which the subject attempts to (re)construct their experience through words.

What does it mean to teach and learn Spanish for specific purposes? The difficulty of describing the specific uses of the language

Carmen López Ferrero — 2025-07-17

Defining and explaining what specificity means in the use of language for teaching and learning is a complex communication action, given the lack of agreement on the definition of the term. In this field, we conducted a discourse analysis of the definitions and explanations offered by 20 expert teachers of Spanish for specific purposes (EFE) about the concept of specificity. The results of the analysis show that the participants of the study use pragmatic and lexical linguistic resources that reveal difficulties in the formulation of definitions. On the pragmatic level, the most frequent marks of indescribability identified are various mitigating resources (constructions limiting the opinion to one’s own person or to a particular field, verbal constructions or modal discursive particles of doubt or probability, approximators or diffusives); on the lexical level, corrective reformulations, use of proformas and repetitions are observed. These pragmatic and lexical resources of indescribability are a reflection of the diversity of perspectives in the field under definition, that of specificity in the use of Spanish. The formulation of a precise description shared by teachers and researchers will contribute to further progress in the field.

Lexical Creativity and Semantic Underspecification in Abstract Nouns

Julieta Straccia — 2025-07-17

When speakers struggle to name or evaluate a referent, they often resort to lexical creativity, particularly metaphorical processes. This paper analyzes various groups of nouns that undergo resemanticization in abstract contexts. Nouns with originally concrete meanings, such as anestesia or ancla, acquire abstract, underspecified meanings that enable metaphorical and hyperbolic references to social situations. Similarly, nouns like balazo and cañonazo (whose established meanings specify the ontological subtype disparo) lose this specification in their neological sense, relying on context for interpretation. This underspecificity allows for their interchangeability. Finally, nouns denoting natural phenomena, such as diluvio, tormenta and tsunami, also become underspecified upon resemanticization, making them interchangeable with one another.

In this article I focus on the analysis of the established and neological meanings of the following names: anestesia, ancla, filtro, pelotón, bolsón, tormenta, diluvio y tsunami. It has been observed that these nouns re-semanticize general like abstract nouns through metaphorical processes, giving rise to new, underspecified meanings. The general nature of these nouns is related to the variety of possible referents they present, which is reflected in an underspecified semantic structure. This study examines underspecification in the lexical field by exploring phenomena related to lexical creativity. Specifically, it investigates the boundaries between discursive metaphor and lexical metaphor in relation to nominal neologisms.

Prosodic patterns linked to the use of como in Río de la Plata Spanish

Laura Tallon — 2025-07-17

The aim of this paper is to analyze the functioning and pragmatic-discursive values of the particle como and its variants como que and como para in a corpus of Río de la Plata Spanish, both as a comparative particle (conjunctive, relative or preposition) and as an operator or discourse marker. Its categorical nature was discussed and its acoustic characteristics were focused on, with the aim of defining prosodic patterns which would be relevant for the identification and characterisation of the values in the contexts of use. The corpus is composed of spontaneous utterances obtained in semi-directed interviews. The informants were two male and three female speakers of Río de la Plata Spanish. For the phonetic and prosodic labeling of utterances, the software Praat (Boersma y Weenink, 2001) and the labeling system for Spanish known as Sp_ToBI (Gurlekian et al., 2004; Hualde y Prieto, 2015) were used. In order to identify prosodic patterns that correlate with their different values, the uses of como present in the corpus were grouped into two groups following a syntactic criterion: their omissibility. In conclusion, we can affirm the existence of prosodic and acoustic characteristics which allow us to identify the two groups: those uses in which the particle como functions only at the syntactic level, and those in which it operates at the discourse level.

The Approximation and Mitigation Marker como in Medieval and Classical Spanish

Nicole Feifel — 2025-07-17

In contemporary Spanish, the lexeme como (‘like’) is used to express approximation, i.e. to provide flexibility to the semantics of the lexical item modified, indicating closeness to the prototype represented by this same lexical item, or closeness to the modified element within a scale, as in the case of gradable adjectives. This device is used in response to communicative challenges associated with indescribability. However, the first uses of como as approximator date back to medieval Spanish. The aim of this paper is to closely examine the approximative uses of como in two historical periods during which this marker has received comparatively little scholarly attention: medieval and classical Spanish. Based on selected texts from the CDH for the medieval and the classical periods, this study focuses on the usage patterns of the approximator como, its distribution across different text types, and its evolution throughout the history of the Spanish language, taking into account the influence of normative tendencies.

La edad de la teoría. De Tel Quel a Literal: el lado B de los setenta

Pablo Debussy — 2025-07-17

El erudito y la esfinge. En torno al vínculo entre Unamuno y Menéndez Pelayo

Gastón G. Beraldi — 2025-07-17

Libro de memorias y aniversarios de Cardeña

Pablo Saracino — 2025-07-17

¿Para qué sirve leer novelas? Narrativas del presente y capitalismo

Patricio Fontana — 2025-07-17