The sciences, in particular the field of medicine, have had an important role in society since its significance has been recorded in historical texts. Due to this fact, the future of medicine depends on, to a certain extent, the knowledge that has been collected in the past from the previously catalogued records. In addition to these records, literature from a specific time period could be useful to study and analyze how opinions have been formulated throughout history, how scientific accomplishments were shared, and what influences impacted society. This study will first explore panoramically the historical context of medicine in Spain from the Medieval through the Golden Age, which is otherwise known as the Early Modern era. Once this foundation has been well-established, this study will evaluate how the authors of each of these specific literary periods used scientific and medical aspects in their literature to reflect the influence and importance of the sciences on the beliefs, opinions, and culture of the individuals and their communities at that time. To accomplish this objective, two relevant literary texts were selected, El conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel and Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, so that their characters, plot, and discourse can be analyzed to provide essential information about the role and relationship between medicine, religion, and society in early modern Spanish peninsular literature.

The Portuguese Future Subjunctive (FS) is frequently studied since out of all modern romance languages, this verbal tense and mood is regularly maintained only in Portuguese. Moreover, variation and alternation occur in the use of the FS by the speakers of the language through a substitution of the irregular inflections of the FS by the regular inflections of the Personal Infinitive (IP). The only difference between the FS and the IP is found in the irregular verbs of the FS, and these are usually "regularized" by Portuguese speakers. Since the regular verbs of the FS are identical to the IP, through a false analogy there is a tendency to use the IP for the irregular verbs as well. This thesis studies the role that immersion plays in the production of the FS and the regularization of irregular verbs by immersed speakers. The results of this study show that although there is a difference in the use of the FS between the immersed and non-immersed speakers, there is no difference as far as the regularization that occurs between both groups. The results also indicate that the regularization phenomenon is minimal, and the only difference between the native speakers of Portuguese in Brazil and the immersed group in the United States is found in the production and election of the verbal tense that is used. Although immersion seems to be affecting the immersed group at a morphological level, there seems to be no difference as far as the regularization of the FS between the immersed and non immersed groups.

Lexical variation, or the existence of multiple lexemes that can be used to denote a particular concept, is a phenomenon characteristic of most of the world’s language systems. Often times the source of this variation is difficult to determine, with a variety of inter- and intra-linguistic factors at play. This thesis was conducted with three main goals: 1) to delineate lexical items typical to specific dialects of Spanish and generate country-specific word lists that focus on salient contrasts between the different varieties of the language; 2) to determine whether speakers of particular varieties of Spanish, namely Puerto Rican and Venezuelan Spanish, were able to recognize lexical items that are supposedly characteristic of their dialect in particular; 3) to examine how dialectal variation can affect linguistic processing. The first part of this investigation examined the relative frequency of use of 1,903 dialectal words in the 22 countries contained within Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual, or CREA, (REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA, 2008). Of these 1,903 words, total of 320 were found to be characteristic of a particular variety of Spanish. The lexical items that demonstrated significant correlation with Puerto Rican and Venezuelan Spanish were then used to develop a picture naming task in which participants were asked to designate whether a particular lexical item constituted an appropriate label for the image depicted. The results from this study suggest that speakers of these two dialects were unable to distinguish words as pertaining to their variety in particular, regardless of the supposed high frequency of use within their dialect. The present study thus theorizes that the processing of these dialectal lexical items is closer to monolingual models rather than bilingual models as bilingual-like behaviors were not observed.

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