Doctorate Courses
21973
Inglés en Contacto con otras Lenguas
This
course has been an overview of the most important linguistic and
sociolinguistic aspects of language contact, i.e., linguistic
situations where two (or more) languages affect each other in
bilingual (or multilingual) individuals and/or speech communities.
The main topics of the course have included mechanisms of
contact-induced change (such as interference, borrowing,
code-switching, code-mixing) as well as outcomes of language contact
of various intensity (such as dialect accommodation, convergence,
mixed languages, pidgins, creoles, and language death). This course
has also helped me to familiarize with the historical and
sociolinguistic contexts in which language contact can be studied,
and has proven itself invaluable for future research in language
contact.
To
fulfil the requirements of this course I have written a paper
entitled Pidgins
and creoles: the case of Chabacano.
The paper offers a revision of the most well-known definitions of
pidgin and creole languages and takes into account the theories that
have accounted for the origin of these languages. Next, I have
focused on Chabacano (a variety of Spanish spoken in the
Philippines), giving an explanation of the origin of the language and
listing the properties of this language.
28024
Contribuciones Extranjeras a la Lengua Inglesa
We
have begun this course discussing how and why languages change and we
have learnt how English is related to such languages as Latin and
Greek and other Indo-European languages. We have then discussed in
some detail crucial changes in word formation
and word meanings (lexicon and semantics) paying particular attention
to lexical borrowing as well as word structure (morphology)
and word order (syntax). We have also considered some of the
important historical events that have affected the English language
from the Old English period up until the present, including the
intellectual and social history of English, in order to explain how
certain events have influenced the development of the language
itself.
To
fulfil the requirements of this course I have worked, together with
another student enrolled in this course, on the field of lexical
borrowing. We have focused on the list of Anglo-Indian words of
Skeat's nineteenth century glossary (which has been included in our
paper) and have made a historical research with regard to the
linguistic origin of the words taking also into account the semantic
changes these words have undergone. The paper (entitled Anglo-Indian
borrowing: linguistic areas and contact effects) also
offers an overview of the linguistic situation in India and attempts
to explain how certain socio-historical events have led to the
process studied here.
28025
Romanticismo y poesía romántica norteamericana y
alemana
This
course has defined the principles of the Romantic school as envisaged
by such German authors as F. Schlegel (1772-1829) and Novalis
(1772-1801), in the context where the Romantic movement has
originated. The main ideas of the Romantic period discussed in this
course may be summarized under four counts: 1. mankind's relation to
the natural environment, 2. characterization of nature as an entity,
3. the construction of the self, 4. the Romantic notion that death is
the source of all imagination and, consequently, of all forms of
artistic expression. These ideas have been shown to be developed by
U.S. Romantic authors since the early nineteenth century, among them
W. Whitman (1819-1892), E. Dickinson (1830-1886), R. Frost
(1874-1963), W. Stevens (1879-1963) and ee cummings (1894-1962).
To
fulfil the requirements of this course I have concentrated on E.
Dickinson's notion of death. I have written a paper entitled 'I
died for beauty': the importance of exploring the frontier,
which offers a discussion of several of E. Dickinson's poems on
death. These poems have been shown to constitute a variation of the
American and Romantic theme of death as source of imagination, where
E. Dickinson describes death (the unknown), and consequently silence,
through language, fulfilling the romantic role of putting into words
what lies beyond rationaloity, what death and silence mean.
28034
Internet: Herramienta de Investigación Literaria
This
course has explored a variety of unconventional approaches to
literature. The class has been conducted on-line and students have
had the possibility of turning to new expressive possibilities opened
up by the internet. We have seen that hypertext literature has two
fundamental properties that make it unique: first, it lets readers to
interact with the text, and second, it lets them perceive the text as
a nonlinear and multilinear structure.
To
fulfil the requirements of this course students have had to
understand hypertext literature as an artist's medium as well as an
information delivery system. We have read Shakespeare and Cervantes'
texts (available on the net) and have discussed them incorporating
our comments to the already existing hypertext, thus, we have
participated in the making of the hypertext. Each student, then, has
uploaded her/his essays to her/his web site (mine deals with fiction
and reality in Shakespeare and Cervantes) and Dr. Vicente Forés
has included them in the web site of this doctorate course, together
with the discussions we have had on-line.
28035
Literatura Fantástica Breve
This
course has dealt with fantastic short stories, concentrating overall
on the whimsical and nightmarish. The course has begun with an
examination of what the 'fantastic' means in literature, according to
Todorov's (1939-) definition. It has thus been considered that 'the
fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only
the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event'
(Todorov 1975:25). Next, the course has focused on the structure of
E.A. Poe's (1809-1849) tales, particularly horror tales, such as The
Masque of the Red Death.
To
fulfil the requirements of this course I have concentrated on the
treatment of 'the fantastic' by Gogol and Kafka. I have written a
paper entitled Gogol y
Kafka: la ironía, la risa y el absurdo, which
offers a comparative study of Gogol's (1809-1852) The Nose and
Kafka's (1883-1924) The Metamorphosis. The essay compares both
tales: both have a similar structure and both begin with fantastic
and grotesque facts that remain irrationally unresolved.
Progressively the reader gets used to the situation presented, which
is humorous in The Nose and depressing (in my view) in The
Metamorphosis, and waits for a solution to come in the last
scenes, which are superb in their ironic simplicity: Gregor Samsa
dies and Kovaliov finds its nose reattached to his face.
28036
Estructuras Retóricas y Léxicas en los Géneros
de Especialidad
The
aim of this course has been to study specialised discourse activities
both from the level of the word and from a discourse perspective: the
choice of lexical items and lexical patterns on the one hand, and the
choice of structural textual patterns on the other hand, have been
studied to show the construction and use of genres in specific
settings. Specialised genres have been considered to develop and take
shape under specific social, cultural and cognitive constraints, and
lexis has been described as a part of register choice in every
individual text.
To
fulfil the requirements of this course I have written a paper
entitled Some characteristics of a specific
language: description of wines,
where I have described the language of oenology used at several
wineries' web pages, from different countries. The paper deeply
analyses the situational context, offers a general linguistic
analysis of the texts, an analysis of text pattering and a lexical
analysis. The paper has shown, in conclusion, that texts describing
wines on the internet constitute a sub-genre, since their
communicative purposes differ from other texts of the field found in
other contexts, from the level of the word and from a linguistic
perspective.
4596A
Narrativa en Lengua Inglesa II
This
is not a doctorate course, but an undergraduate course that I took in
1998 with Dr. Vicente Forés where students were required to
upload their papers to mural.uv.es web, and got used to work on line.
Then I wrote a paper on Huxley's Brave New World, which may
still be read here.