The article opens with a brief overview of past and present research activities in the field of Argentine Spanish, and of the most important publications in recent years. Then it summarizes the most important characteristics of Argentine Spanish in its phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical levels. Based on a comparison of several important peculiarities, like the pronunciation of the /y-/ at the beginning of a syllable, the /-s/ at the end of a syllable and the phenomenon voseo, which affects pronouns and verb morphology, the article points out the main differences between the regional varieties of Argentine Spanish. Finally, the article gives a brief description of Argentine dialect zones, pointing out the historical, social and linguistic causes of the variation of Argentine Spanish.
With this research, based on a sample of authentic linguistic material (mostly taken from the written press and from literary texts), following the preferences or tendencies, I pretend to, on the one hand, reveal/describe the syntacticsemantic combinatorics (the propositional types and respective forms they co-occur with, types of subjects and their quantification, number and nature of the arguments and their syntactic configuration) and the semantic-lexical combinatorics (what aspectual types of verbal predicates they combine with – ‘state verbs’, ‘process verbs’, ‘culminated process verbs’, ‘culmination verbs’ or ‘point verbs’ – and their significant implications) of the ‘progressive’ ( and ) in present-day European Portuguese and, on the other hand, identify/determine their variation.
Admitting that certain mistakes in their paper (Cermak, Sgall and Vybiral 2005) have to be corrected, the authors claim that one of the main issues relevant to the present discussion concerns the difference between a book and a short paper which necessarily includes quotations from other writings; these should not be ignored, and the results of the research conducted up until now should be reflected. The present paper then argues that some of the old arguments are still valid and that the concept of a standard and its variants is to be understood taking into account a transitional zone between the standard and everyday spoken usage. The older traditions of prescriptive linguistics still have not been overcome by functional approaches, especially in school education.
In the paper the author pays attention to how A. Christie in particular texts rewrites the fixed codes of the detective genre by their variations. For instance in the 'Murder on the Orient Express', she symmetrically turns the code of the detective story: a criminal used to be found as one of the persons from the closed circle of suspicious people - in case of the Orient Express - each of those who took part in the case are the criminals except the one who was considered to be a suspicious. In the story 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd' the murderer is a narrator, who concealed his crime (that course was not new: before Christie it had been used by Cechov, M. Leblanc a S. Elvestad). In 'The A.B.C. Murders', Christie first simulated the method typical for the criminal genre, than the text finally resulted in the detective story according to all literary rules. She also introduced 'topoi' of camouflaging murders later used many times in the detective stories. We can follow up further plots in the texts transforming the mentioned proto-text of A. Christie (M. P. Schaffer, J. Symons, A. Kristof, F. Vargas).
Word formation variants of phraseological units are characterized by the difference in word formation structure of words-components and are represented more widely in slang than in the literary (standard) language. Word formation variation in slang is characterized by a specific set of means which are not represented in word formation variation of literary language phraseological units: in slang the variation of non-synonymous prefixes takes place; there is a tendency of forming variants by means of desuffixation; most phraseological variants are marked by reflected variation and the synonymy of a motivating and motivated variants, which leads to word formation affixes desemantization.
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