Spanish Language: Origins, Textual Properties, and Sentence Structure

Posted on Oct 10, 2024 in Social sciences

Spanish Language Origins and Influences

Spanish, also known as Castilian, is a Romance language primarily derived from Latin. Over time, its vocabulary has been enriched by loanwords from various languages.

Loanword Origins

  • Pre-Roman: While few in number, these are the oldest loanwords.
  • Germanisms: Words from the Visigoths.
  • Arabisms: The most numerous, contributing over four thousand words.
  • Americanisms: Words from languages spoken in the Americas before Columbus’s arrival.
  • Italianisms: Terms introduced during the 16th and 17th centuries.
  • Learned Words: Latin-origin words introduced later with minimal changes.
  • Gallicisms: Terms adopted from French during the 12th and 13th centuries.
  • Other Languages: Including Basque, Galician, and Catalan.
  • Anglicisms: Primarily 20th-century words from English.
  • Neologisms: Terms coined for new concepts.

Textual Properties and Analysis

A text is a comprehensive oral or written disclosure, varying in length and occurring within a specific context with a particular communicative intent. Meaning can vary based on the speaker’s intention and the situation.

Key Textual Properties

  • Adequacy: The text aligns with the communicative intention and context.
  • Coherence: Statements within the text are interconnected, non-contradictory, logically related, and progressively informative.
  • Cohesion: The linguistic expression of coherence, encompassing lexical, semantic, and grammatical aspects.

Lexical and Semantic Cohesion

Lexical cohesion is achieved through word repetition and derivation. Semantic cohesion involves repetition of meaning through:

  • Synonyms: Words with similar meanings (e.g., calendar-almanac).
  • Contextual Synonyms: Words with similar meanings within a specific context.
  • Word Stems: Sharing a common root.
  • Hypernyms: Words whose meaning encompasses others (e.g., fruit).
  • Hyponyms: Words whose meaning is included in another (e.g., apple, banana are hyponyms of fruit).
  • Antonyms: Words with opposite meanings.
  • Semantic Fields: Words belonging to the same conceptual area.
  • Associated Realities: Words related to a specific activity or concept (e.g., excursion: backpack, boots).

Grammatical Cohesion

  1. Articles: Anaphorically link to previously mentioned nouns.
  2. Deictics: Words referencing grammatical persons (e.g., pronouns, possessives, demonstratives, adverbs like here, there, now).
  3. Relatives: Anaphorically connect to earlier elements in the discourse.
  4. Verb Tense and Aspect: Maintain consistency and temporal relationships.
  5. Ellipsis: Omission of unnecessary elements.

Textual Connectors

These words or phrases link sentences and paragraphs, guiding the flow of information and marking relationships between ideas.

Text Types and Classification

Texts are classified based on various criteria:

  • Channel: Oral or written.
  • Communication Situation: Formal or colloquial.
  • Communicative Intention: Expressive, representative/referential, appellative, phatic, metalinguistic, or poetic/literary.
  • Discourse Form: Narrative, descriptive, expository, dialogic, argumentative, or instructive.

Sentence Structure and Grammatical Functions

Coordinated Sentences

  • Copulative: and, e
  • Disjunctive: either, or
  • Adversative: but, more, however
  • Distributive: well…well, ya..ya
  • Explanatory: i.e., that is

Sentence Elements

  • Subject: Who or what performs the action.
  • Complement of the Noun (CN) or Adjective (Ady): Modifies a noun.
  • Attribute: Describes the subject.
  • Direct Object (CD): Receives the action of the verb.
  • Complement of the Regime (CR): Similar to CD but requires a preposition.
  • Indirect Object (CI): To or for whom the action is done.
  • Circumstantial Complement (CC): Indicates how, when, where, why, with what, to whom, etc.
  • Predicate Complement: Similar to CC of Manner but agrees in gender and number with the subject or object.
  • Agent Complement: Used in passive voice, introduced by “by.”
  • Apposition: A noun placed next to another to specify or clarify.

Special Cases

  • With the verb “to like,” what is liked is the subject, and who likes it is the indirect object.
  • Verbs like “is” and “there will be” often lack a subject (impersonal sentences).