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The Italian composer of operas, Giuseppe Verdi, relied heavily on plays of the Romantic Era as sources for opera librettos. Three such plays were from the Spanish Romantic School: El trovador and Simon Bocanegra by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, and Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino by Angel de Saavedra, el Duque de Rivas. The operas which Verdi composed using these plays as sources--Il trovatore, Simon Boccanegra, and La forza del destino--range in popularity from near zenith (Il trovatore) to near nadir (Simon Boccanegra). The study attempts to assess the suitability of the three Spanish dramas as source material for operas, and to determine if this suitability is correlated to each opera's popularity.

For response styles, malingering describes the deliberate production of feigned symptoms by persons seeking external gain such as financial compensation, exemption from duty, or leniency from the criminal justice system. In contradistinction, defensiveness occurs when patients attempt to downplay their symptoms of psychological impairment. Both of the aforementioned response styles can markedly affect the accuracy of diagnosis, especially on self-reports, such as multiscale inventories. As an important oversight, no studies have been conducted to examine the effect of culturally specific response styles on profile validity and the classification of malingering among Hispanic American clinical populations. The current study investigated whether the Spanish Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) effectively distinguished between Spanish-speaking outpatient groups randomly assigned to honest, feigning, and defensive experimental conditions. In examining the results, PAI malingering indicators utilizing Rare Symptoms strategies (NIM and MAL) demonstrated moderate to large effect sizes. For defensiveness, Spanish PAI indicators also demonstrated moderate to very large effect sizes (M d = 1.27; range from 0.94 to 1.68). Regarding psychometric properties, Spanish PAI validity scales, provide adequate to good data on reliability and discriminant validity. Clinical utility of the Spanish PAI increases as different cut scores are employed.

Verbal periphrases in the Spanish language and their Czech equivalents As the title suggests, the object of the thesis is verbal periphrases. In the theoretic part, we dealt with the function of verbal periphrases as a means to convey the nature of verbal action in Spanish. Moreover, we briefly explained the issue of Czech and Spanish verbal aspect. After we familiarized ourselves with the semantic and formal classification of Spanish verbal periphrases in general; taking the volume of the topic into account, we decided to dedicate ourselves in detail to a specific type of periphrasis, the periphrasis with the infinitive. In addition, we described the stylistic and regional differences of the periphrasis which express the start of action and which were covered in the practical part of the work. Furthermore, we looked at individual infinitive periphrases from the group of modal and aspectual periphrases. In this part of work, we drew from the Descriptive grammar and its terminology. Since our objective was to compare the situation in Spanish with the one in Czech, we endeavored to supplement even this theoretical part with the examples from the parallel corpus. We tried to make these examples as representative as possible. In the practical part of our work, we decided to search in corpus for Czech...

Literary responses to Republican exile are diverse and autobiographical works have emerged as a significant modality of this exilic literature. Utilising poetics as a mode of inquiry, this thesis aims to examine some of the complex and nuanced ways in which exile has shaped autobiographical writing by both first and second-generation female exiles. To this end, I trace a poetics of exile in a selected corpus of nineteen autobiographical works by twelve authors: Constancia de la Mora, Isabel Oyarzábal de Palencia, Silvia Mistral, Clara Campoamor, Victoria Kent, Luisa Carnés, Remedios Oliva Berenguer, Francisca Muñoz Alday, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, María Rosa Lojo, María Luisa Elío and Arantzazu Amezaga Iribarren. These texts were published across a seventy year period (1939 – 2009) in a number of geographical locations and written in a variety of circumstances. Exilic autobiographical texts are not homogeneous and relatively few have adhered to traditional models of autobiography. As such, the works examined are drawn from a variety of autobiographical sub-genres including propagandistic autobiographies, diaries, political essays, hybrid texts, autofiction, memoirs, childhood autobiographies, more experimental semi-autobiographical texts and a film. The main body of this thesis presents six aspects of a poetics of exile — the notion of the addressee, generic hybridization, polyphony, the propagation of collective memory, postmemory, and retroprogressive representations of childhood — and adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that draws upon a number of fields. This thesis aims to offer an illumination of the breadth and difference of women's exilic autobiographical writing as highlighted in the identification of six very different aspects of a poetics of exile.

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The ever increasing popularity of virtual worlds, also known as 3-D multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) or simply virtual worlds provides language instructors with a new tool they can exploit in their courses. For now, Second Life is one of the most popular MUVEs used for teaching and learning, and although Second Life was not initially designed as an educational tool, it has developed into one used in higher education institutions worldwide. In the field of second language acquisition, Second Life could be used to immerse students in the target language and culture. Students can travel to virtual versions of cities or countries where the target language is spoken and engage in meaningful interactions while instructors can track written and spoken linguistic patterns through the program's features. Virtual worlds appeal to language instructors and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) researchers alike because of the affordances it offers. Yet, there are many areas left to explore. The focus of this study was to measure and evaluate the effects of using the 3-D MUVE Second Life on students' motivation to learn Spanish as a foreign language, and on students' academic achievement and language proficiency. This study incorporated qualitative and quantitative research methods to assess the effects of the treatment (i.e., using Second Life) on each of the variables. Significant differences existed in motivation between the groups; however, academic achievement and language proficiency between the control and experimental groups were very similar. The researcher used a phenomenological approach to gather and analyze data from student and instructor interviews. This approach helped the researcher understand the effects of using Second Life in a Spanish course by providing insight on students and the instructor's opinions about the virtual world's applicability as a tool for language learning and teaching. Circumlocution, exposure to the target language, finding people and destinations, and technical difficulties, such as the use of voice chat were salient themes during the interviews. Future efforts should focus on improving the design process of activities through the application of instructional design principles to ensure that they provide sufficient guidance and scaffolding for students to develop their language skills.

The purpose of the study is to examine how the Spanish teachers in secondary schools consider culture and intercultural competencies. This study also makes use of a sociocultural perspective that is in relation with the intercultural perspective and puts its mark in the study. To support our research we used the qualitative method, specifically, the semi-structured interview. Five Spanish language faculty members stemming from various areas of the country were interviewed. As a result of the questions presented we were able to conclude that teaching Spanish and Latin American culture is a fundamental objective in Spanish language classes. Another aspect that is worth highlighting in the data analysis is the importance of intercultural education in order to avoid misunderstandings, stereotypes, and cultural prejudices. In order to obtain this objective it is necessary that the language teacher apply different resources, strategies, and materials that will help activate and motivate students' learning, comprehension and interactions with other cultures.

In 1988 Bernardo Adam Ferrero's wind band composition Homenaje a Joaquín Sorolla was premiered at the International Wind Band Contest in Valencia, Spain. This relatively unknown wind band composition combines the elements of visual art and music to create a contemporary work for wind band using oil-canvas paintings of Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla as the source of inspiration. In this document, the author discusses pertinent biographical information about the composer and the artist, and examines the wind band composition and the paintings through musical and visual analysis to evaluate Ferrero's musical interpretation of programmatic themes of the paintings. Through analysis of the craftsmanship of this composition and its connection to the visual arts, the author advocates for Homenaje a Joaquín Sorolla’s inclusion in the core wind band repertoire.

The major aim of this thesis is to characterize the use of diminutive forms in Mexican Spanish and to analyze it in the corpora. Secondarily, a series of activities is proposed so that the topic could be worked with in the classes of Spanish as a foreign language. The thesis consists of two main parts, a theoretical and an empirical one, and an appendix. In the theoretical introduction, the concept of the diminutive is described, as well as its morphological and semantic-pragmatic features, its peculiar use in American varieties of Spanish and, especially, its implementation in Mexican Spanish. Possible explanations of its idiosyncratic use are given; in particular, the Mexican society and the influence of Náhuatl are analyzed. The empirical part is divided into two sections. The main analysis focuses on the use of the diminutive in Mexican Spanish from the socio-linguistic and morfo-semantic point of view. The analysis is realized in the Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México. In the secondary analysis, the most frequent diminutives are investigated in the Corpus de Referencia del Espaňol Actual and the Corpus Diacrónico del Espaňol. The appendix presents various dynamic and communicatively-oriented activities, proposed both to practice the diminutive and to introduce the socio-cultural element, essential in the language teaching.