This study is part of the IN.MIGRA-2 CM project, which studies the sociolinguistic integration of the immigrant population of Madrid. The present study focuses on the language attitudes of 16 residents of Alcalá de Henares, a community of Madrid. The participants were asked to rate their level of agreement with the following affirmations: (1) The Spanish of Madrid is more correct than the forms of speech of Latin American immigrants; (2) Mastery of the Spanish language is the principal demonstration of the integration of immigrants; (3) Immigrants of Latin American origin are integrated because they speak the same language. The study finds a connection between higher levels of contact with immigrants and lower ratings of agreement with the affirmations. This investigation supports others that show connections between social networks and language attitudes, and it adds to the sparse research on language attitudes in Madrid. Adverbial adjectives modify both a verb and the subject of that verb. Their purpose is to describe a quality that pertains to both the subject and the way the subject is performing the verb. Because they modify both the verb and the noun, adverbial adjectives agree with the noun in number and gender. The generativist approaches to this linguistic phenomenon do not provide a sufficient explanation of verb + adverbial adjective constructions nor do they predict which subjects and predicates that can be used in these constructions. This paper takes a usage-based approach to adverbial adjectives. It explores the token frequencies of use of different verb + adverbial adjective phrases and attempts to categorize the components of these phrases based on these frequencies.

This research investigated the effect of frequency of language use on the production of consonant gradation by non-dominant speakers of Finnish in the immigrant community of Sointula, BC. Three types of frequency – word-frequency, suffix-frequency, and stem-frequency – were tested. It also investigated whether quantitative or qualitative gradation is more successful in producing gradation than the other and, finally, whether immigrant generation can explain the variation between participants. A translation task was administered to the six participants across three generations. Based on the framework of exemplar-driven cognitive grammar (Bybee 2001; Pierrehumbert 2001), the frequency-effects were assumed to be contingent upon the mode of lexical access; frequent complex words, presumably accessed as wholes thanks to frequent usage, would not exhibit as many gradation errors as infrequent words, which would be accessed via their composite parts due to infrequency. The anticipated frequency-effects were not found. Both frequent and infrequent words manifested some gradation loss as an analogical change. This suggests that all words are infrequent. While Bybee’s model assumes high-volume language use over time in dominant language contexts, lack of volume appears to suppress the differential behavior between frequent and infrequent words in Sointula. However, correct gradation was predictable based on suffix-use, which in turn was determined partly by semantics of suffixes; those Finnish suffixes that are semantically mappable to equivalent morphemes in English were better preserved than GEN object-markers, which do not have corresponding morpheme in English. With the atrophy of the GEN object-marker also gradation becomes redundant. This may arise from the tendency to mark syntactic constituency with word-order alone in English-influenced Finnish. Thus, semantics of suffixes proves to be a better predictor of gradation than frequency. Gradation loss increased with each generation born abroad; by G3, it has all but disappeared. Consonant gradation is not preserved through the generations. Qualitative gradation disappears before quantitative gradation. The above findings are sensible in a context of reduced language-functionality. Against expectation, little evidence for storing sub-word morphemes and decomposed access was found. Instead, the data suggests that most stored lexical items are whole words and that gradation is associated with whole complex forms.