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With the rise of fascism in Europe. many writers found they could no longer voice their opinions freely. Aside from the threat of imprisonment or death, strict censors were put into place, so any criticism of the regime had to be disguised. Nevertheless, some writers were able to bypass the censors and offer criticism of the regime in power. The authors warn against the techniques used like mass propaganda, aggressive approaches to war, and extreme nationalism in their literature. By examining the literature that appeared under fascism, this thesis attempts to establish a cross-cultural connection between Italy and Spain through two unique authors and their highly personalized criticism by examining Carlo Emilio Gadda's La cognizione del dolore and Carmen Laforet's Nada. Gadda uses autobiographical references in his works as symbols of Mussolini's fascism, and Laforet is able to capture the female perspective of life under Franco's rule due to her unique upbringing in the Canaries. In distressing political times they were able to relate the situation to their own lives and by doing so find a creative outlet to oppose fascism. In the case of these authors, it is essential to consider their biographies to fully comprehend their workst due to the personalized approach to criticism, which allows for a more complete reading of the text. With this comparative study I hope to bring more attention to these authors through an emphasis on the value of literary opposition to fascism in the context of history.

The Baroque-era Spanish poet Luis de Góngora is renowned for his difficult syntax, and particularly for the literary device called hyperbaton, or the stylistic inversion of normal word order. While the elaborate gongorismo style has not gone unnoticed by linguists, classical analyses of the poet’s work typically view sentence structure as one-dimensional and characterize the force of a hyperbaton by the length of an interposed phrase. Taking the sonnets of Góngora as a data set, I invoke the theory of generative syntax to argue that this apparent interposition is actually multiple instances of raising, often into specifier positions, though typically for stylistic reasons rather than for the purpose of feature-checking. Esta tesis está escrita en español.

This study offers an assessment of the non-native speech intelligibility of a group of English learners of Spanish at word level and in connected speech. Specifically, we aimed at analysing the impact of certain categories of phonemic errors, as well as three temporal variables of L2 speech (speech rate, pause frequency and pause duration) on intelligibility scores. In addition, the possible correlation between degree of intelligibility and certain individual factors (gender, level of proficiency, motivation, aptitude and L1) was also studied. Sixty evaluators, native speakers of Peninsular Spanish, transcribed different speech samples belonging to a group of 20 Key Stage 4 English learners of Spanish. The transcription of the different speech samples served to assess intelligibility at word level and in connected speech (sentence, passage and semi-spontaneous production). Results revealed an intelligibility loss at all levels of analysis, as well as a high correlation between intelligibility scores in the single word test and those obtained in connected speech. At a segmental level, deviations affecting vowels, especially unstressed vowels, seemed to play a more important role than inaccuracies affecting consonants. Moreover, correlation analyses underscored the importance of speech rate, pause frequency and pause duration for intelligibility loss. The predictability of our multiple-regression models was high for speech samples obtained at sentence and passage levels. However, multiple-regression models for speech samples obtained through the semi-spontaneous production task exhibited a more limited capability in predicting variation in students’ intelligibility scores. Results suggest the existence of additional variables affecting intelligibility at this level of analysis. All individual differences under study, with the exception of gender, were highly correlated with speech intelligibility. From a pedagogical perspective, it is argued here that any successful instructional treatment of speech intelligibility will depend on an appropriate integration of temporal aspects of speech within the time devoted to pronunciation instruction in the foreign language classroom.

This qualitative study gave insight on the benefits that a university literature course for future Spanish teachers could contribute to preservice teachers as part of their preparation program. Nine university students participated in this study as they were the ones enrolled in this first-time offered university literature course for Spanish teachers. Data were collected from pre- and post-questionnaires, journals, and course observations. The findings suggested that the preservice teachers grew in pedagogical content knowledge, literary content, resources and strategies, and felt an overall sense of preparedness to use literary sources in their future classrooms

Language acquisition research frequently concerns itself with linguistic development and result of the acquisition process with respect to a first or subsequent language. For some, it seems tacitly assumed that a first language, once acquired, remains stable, regardless of exposure to and the acquisition of additional language(s) beyond the first one in childhood. Research on language attrition (language loss) questions the validity of this assumption and raises questions that will not only help in describing and explaining the nature of linguistic attrition, but also shed light on the mental (cognitive) representation of human language. The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the general program of research that investigates possible domains of first language attrition and its cause(s). More specifically, I endeavor to test the predictions and theoretical tenability of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci 2006) as applied to language attrition (e.g. Tsimpli et al 2004). The Interface Hypothesis claims that certain linguistic properties, namely those at external interfaces such as the syntax/discourse interface, are especially vulnerable to optionality in language acquisition (see Sorace and Serratrice 2009). For attrition, it predicts that, upon sufficient exposure, linguistic properties that are dependent on interfaces between the linguistic computational system and external domains of cognition (such as pragmatics and discourse structure) are more vulnerable to erosion than those that lie internally to the linguistic system (e.g. syntax/semantic interface) or those that are purely syntactic in nature. Within this framework, attrition is hypothesized to either be due to direct interference from the L2 or due to linguistic processing deficits that are a byproduct of being bilingual. The comprehensive nature of this case study, which tests the L1 grammar of an adult native speaker of Spanish after 25 years of uninterrupted naturalistic exposure to Brazilian Portuguese across the different property types, not only allows for an examination of possible domains of attrition (e.g. external interfaces, internal interfaces, syntax) but also allows for teasing apart of the cause of attrition by combining both untimed and timed methodologies. Although the main focus of this dissertation is to test the limits and explanatory value of the Interface Hypothesis, the data will also be examined in light of other theories such as Paradis' (2004) Activation Threshold Hypothesis and Jakobson's (1940) Regression Hypothesis to determine the extent to which various theories might best explain the data to be obtained.