"Diferències de grau en el canvi lingüistic morfològic dins d'una zona del català i aproximació a les causes"
by Montserrat Adam i Aulinas

This paper examines the evolution during the 20th century of 10 dialectal features of verbal morphology, in an area of northeastern Catalonia. It compares dialectological data collected by Alcover in the first decades of the 20th century with data from recent interviews that have been carried out. The general conclusion is that, in this period, whereas features that can be characterized as typical of Roussillon Catalan have receded, those that are typical of Girona Catalan have remained stable in their use or, even, have increased. After presenting the numerical facts, the paper discusses spatialtypology reasons that might explain this particular evolution; it also refers to system-internal reasons that should be taken into account as well..

"Political (Im)politeness: Discourse Power and Political Power in Electoral Debates"
by Maria Josep Marín

This paper studies the pragmatic-discursive function of perception-verb markers in electoral debates in Catalan. The analysis reveals that these elements play an important role as implicit argumentation resources. In this sense, they emphasize the confrontation of the participants, which is organized basically through counter-argumentation and attack to the addressee’s face. This main function, related to the persistence of the imperative value of the verb forms, presents different degrees in the different markers analyzed: those markers coming from active perception (miri and even more escolti) structure a greater argumentative force. The extension of the theory about linguistic politeness from ordinary conversation to political discourse shows that the elements analyzed emphasize a peculiar kind of linguistic (im)politeness in political debates.

"‘Parlo...’: A Catalan Voice from the Holocaust: Writer and Survivor of Mauthausen Joaquim Amat-Piniella Shatters Francoist Mandate Silence"
by M. Tobin Stanley

Following the retreat to France of half a million Spaniards in the winter of ’38/39 and as a result of the Nazi occupation, 10,000-15,000 Spaniards were deported to concentration camps. Among them was the writer Joaquim Amat- Piniella (1913-1974). His novel K.L. Reich, whose title alludes to the stamp impressed on all objects within the Nazi Reich’s concentration camps, creates a fictional world that reflects the realities within Mauthausen. That author writes in a draft (without date), that with this story his wish was not to focus on the horrors, but rather to document (“manar un record”), and to relate the historical catastrophes of “cruelty, misery, suffering, but also hope.” His poetic work Les llunyanies (The Far Away Lands) also reveals what Amat denoted as his “white hour,” an awakening of conscience and consciousness, the insistence on what is human and humane precisely because he was able to endure four and a half years of brutality. In addition to his novel and poetry, Amat-Piniella’s political efforts following his liberation promoted the reconciliation that resulted from a sense of justice. With his poetry, this native of Manresa expressed the gamut of his affective responses to Mauthausen. With K.L. Reich, Amat-Piniella gives voice to the Republicans whose exile led to a concentrationary sentence. With his activism, he did everything possible to vindicate the ex-prisoners and obtain for them their due “indemnización” (compensatory damages) and thus overcome the obstacles imposed by the repressive forces. In spite of numerous hurdles, Amat was triumphant.

"The Freedom of the Aesthetic: Montserrat Roig’s Use of the City in Ramona, adéu"
by Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

"Special Cluster: New Perspectives in Linguistics"
edited by Llorenç Comajoan and Maria-Rosa Lloret

"Catalan Linguistics: New Trends and Findings"
by Llorenç Comajoan and Maria-Rosa Lloret

"The Use of Present Perfect in the Expression of Past Temporality in L2 Spanish and Catalan by Children of Moroccan Origin"
by Eulàlia Canals

This study examines the acquisition of Catalan and Spanish past-tense verbs (Preterite, Present Perfect, and Imperfect) by children of Moroccan origin in three schools in the Barcelona metropolitan area. It presents data that allow us to study which of the three tenses poses the most problems for the second language (L2) speakers as compared to the native speakers in a control group. The data were obtained using elicited story-retell tasks and oral narratives. The results show that in both languages acquiring the accurate functional use of verbs is more difficult than making the right lexical or morphological choices. The greatest functional difficulty lies in the acquisition of the Preterite vis-à-vis the Present Perfect. These results provide additional evidence that form precedes function. However, they challenge an established position on the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages, which holds that the most difficult functional feature to acquire for L2 learners of these languages is the difference between perfective and imperfective tenses.

"Intercomprehension and Catalan: The EuroCom Project"
by Esteve Clua

This paper presents a method to teach intercomprehension (a strategy for simultaneous learning of receptive capacities in languages that belong to the same linguistic family) as a means for strengthening multilingualism in order to overcome communication problems generated by the growing need for interrelationships, without having to forsake language diversity. The paper introduces EuroCom, an intercomprehension project involving three large European linguistic families (Slavonic, Germanic, and Romance), and describes its methodology and strategies for learning. The article stresses the importance of intercomprehension for languages like Catalan as a strategy to truly promote the respect for linguistic diversity at the European and Spanish levels.

"Idees entorn del llenguatge i de les llengües a l’ensenyament secundari públic de Barcelona: visibilitat, diversitat i correcció"
by Pere Comellas

This article presents and discusses the results of a questionnaire completed by 74 secondary school teachers in Barcelona. The topics of the questionnaire revolved around linguistic representations, especially those relating to the visibility of linguistic diversity in secondary schools (e.g., the need to preserve languages, representations of language varieties, and so on). The responses from the teachers show considerable variation in their awareness of the presence of different languages in their surroundings; and make clear that identification with a state and the official status of a language are factors that contribute to creating visibility over and above the size of the community in the environment or the overall number of speakers. The data also reveal a certain degree of incoherence between general principles and concrete situations, and between situations close to the teachers (related to their own language) and alien situations. Finally, the results are related to variables that describe the language teachers, such as their age, first language, and the department to which they belong in the secondary school.

"Constructing Diversity: Teachers’ Perspectives on Classrooms in Catalonia"
by Melinda Dooly

Interactional analysis can be used to explore transcripts and to provide access to embedded, intertextual information in the discussion participants’ talk. In this article, the analysis provides “portraits” of preservice and inservice teachers’ orientation towards linguistic diversity in Catalan schools —orientations which can help reveal the discourse participants’ previous knowledge and understanding of such categories. By recognising these categorizations as both bounded by commonsense background knowledge and constructed in situ, the analysis looks at the categorising processes used by teachers as a part of their life of teaching. It also reveals the social nature of these categorizations because they are, in the dialogic sense, an inseparable element of the socially constituted fabric of language and human interaction (Bakhtin, Dialogic) in the environment of schooling and society.

"An Acoustic Description of Central Catalan Vowels Based on Real and Nonsense Word Data"
by Dylan Herrick

This paper examines the extent to which vowel height data taken from real words differs from data taken from nonsense words, and it finds no significant differences. As a result, it provides quantitative acoustic data for the seven stressed and three unstressed vowels of Standard Catalan (as uttered by female speakers). The data are drawn from three distinct phonetic contexts, i.e., /bVp/, /bVt/, and /bVk/, and the /bVp/ context consists entirely of nonsense words (the other contexts were all real words). A comparison and statistical analysis of the data for each vowel phoneme show that there are neither considerable nor statistically significant differences in the vowel height (F1 values) among the data from the three different phonetic contexts. In terms of vowel height, nonsense words provide as accurate a picture of the Catalan data as real words do.

"Catalan’s Place in Romance Revisited"
by Matthew Juge

Catalan is unique among the Romance languages in having a relatively large number of speakers in a thriving speech community but not being the dominant language of a major nation-state. It is also unusual in that its position within the Romance subfamily is a matter of some debate. I argue that the application of the principle of contact linguistics to data from Catalan dialects, especially the Alguerès variety, support rejecting the traditional treatment of Catalan as Ibero-Romance and Occitan as Gallo-Romance in favor of placing Catalan and Occitan together in a separate subbranch.

"Some Current Phonological Features in the Catalan of Barcelona"
by Conxita Lleó, Ariadna Benet, and Susana Cortés

This article presents some preliminary results of a project on alleged on-going phonological changes of the Catalan spoken in Barcelona that is carried out at the University of Hamburg. Data focusing on the production of the Catalan mid-open vowels and schwa elicited from three generations of speakers (children, young adults, and older adults) in two districts of Barcelona differing in usage of Spanish are auditorily analyzed. Results show that, in Nou Barris (the district with more Spanish input), mid-open vowels are often replaced by their mid-close counterparts, and schwas are replaced by [a] in the two younger generations, whereas in Gràcia (the district with less Spanish input), the younger generations produce Catalan vowels more often than the older generation. These findings are attributed to the positive influence of school together with a strong presence of Catalan in Gràcia, and to a limited Catalan input in Nou Barris.

"Les relacions espacials: les localitzacions metafòriques"
by Joan-Rafel Ramos

This article examines spatial expressions from a Cognitive Linguistics approach. It argues that spatial expressions are used not only to describe concrete objects, but also to refer to abstract notions by means of metaphorical locations. Specifically, the basic conceptual schema for any location can result in more abstract schemata to refer to a property, a state, an activity, or a possession. Conveying these four abstract notions entails using a variety of syntactic structures, one of them being the focus of this paper: “copula verb (ésser/estar ‘be’) + en ‘in’ + NP.” This structure is examined from diachronic and synchronic perspectives in Old Catalan and Modern Catalan, respectively. Finally, the Catalan results are compared vis-à-vis other European languages, namely, Finnish and Welsh.

"Spoken and Written Representation of Number in L2 Catalan Indefinite Determiner Phrases"
by Liliana Tolchinsky, Naymé Salas, and Joan Perera

The study explores the relationship that second language (L2) learners of Catalan establish between the spoken and the written representation of number inflection within an indefinite-article Determiner Phrase (DP); and it also addresses first language (L1) influence in this process. Five- to eight-yearolds, speakers of varieties of Chinese and Moroccan Arabic, with differing degrees of literacy instruction in their home countries —but similar time of residence in Catalonia— participated in the study. The children carried out individual semi-structured tasks designed to evaluate comprehension and production of changes in number inflections (un cotxe ‘a car’; uns cotxes ‘a-pl cars’). Results showed that, irrespective of children’s language background, comprehension preceded production of singular and plural indefinite-article DPs; spoken representation was easier than written representation of number changes; and production of plural indefinite-article DPs was more difficult than its singular counterpart. Despite typological differences between the languages compared, both groups of L2 learners, even the Catalan control group, underwent similar processes.

Les aules d’acollida de l’educació primària i secundària obligatòria de Catalunya: un estudi comparatiu
by Ignasi Vila, Imma Canal, Pere Mayans, Santiago Perera, Josep Maria Serra i Carina Siqués

people due to the arrival of immigrants from outside Spain. This new situation has created a challenge for the educational system and the acquisition and use of Catalan in schools. In order to ensure that Catalan continued to be the main language in schools, the Catalan government initiated a programme whose main objectives are social cohesion and providing support for the acquisition of Catalan for students who incorporate late to the educational system. The so-called aules d’acollida are classes where Catalan for academic and conversational purposes is taught to those students who do not have enough knowledge of Catalan to be in a regular class. This paper provides results on the acquisition of Catalan by the students who attended the aules d’acollida in year 2005-06. All students attending aules d’acollida in primary and secondary schools in Catalonia took two tests that evaluated the acquisition of Catalan and school integration/adaptation. The results show that a) students achieved better results in comprehension skills than in production skills, b) the fewer hours the students spent in the aules the higher the proficiency they achieved, and c) students who had a Romance language as their L1 obtained better results than student who spoke non-Romance languages.

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