Journal of Philology and Linguistics of the University of Costa Rica

Luis A. Ramos-García (Ed.). Justicia social: Reivindicaciones del arte de creación colectiva. Lawrence, Kansas: Center of Latin American Studies, 2024, 257 páginas

Conxita Domènech — 2025-01-27

José Francisco de Isla. Fray Gerundio de Campazas. Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2023, 1420 páginas. Edición, estudio y notas de Miguel Figueras Martí.

Jorge Chen Sham — 2025-01-27

Esther Fernández Rodríguez. Títeres de lo imposible: Animación, maravilla y espectáculo en la España de la modernidad temprana. Kassel, Alemania: Edition Reichenberger, 2024, 220 páginas.

Andrés Lema-Hincapié — 2025-01-27

History, typology, and functionality of ancient biographical narratives: an examination in light of the Euripidean case and the Socratic exemplum

Bruno D. Alfonzo — 2025-01-27

The study of ancient biography has experienced growing interest in recent decades, establishing itself as an autonomous
research area. This article examines its methodologies, highlighting works that since the 20th century have explored
biographical literature from a historical-chronological perspective before shifting their approach towards a typological
inquiry. The article proposes a study applied to a particular case —that of the Greek playwright Euripides— aiming to
discuss the limits of the usual typological conception of biographical literature by pointing out a third avenue of analysis (the
functional), considered here as a superior synthesis of the previous ones whose hermeneutic benefits are demonstrated in the
proposed examination. In this sense, an interpretation of the story about the death of Euripides is postulated based on its
relationship with the process that led to the death of Socrates.

Family Puzzle: Fragmentation and Repetition in Quiénes somos ahora, by Katya Adaui

Jesús Adalberto Campaña Fimbres — 2025-01-27

Katya Adaui's (1977) narrative work has some common aspects, such as both formal and thematic fragmentation in tune with complex family relationships. Quienes somos ahora (2022), her most recent novel, is no exception to the Peruvian author's aesthetic tendencies. The writer deploys an extremely interesting construction that is oriented towards hybridization with the axes of family relationships, through the constant instrumentalization of two main resources: fragmentation and repetition that repeatedly reorients the suggested themes with a language in continuous dialogue with poetry. This article aims to investigate the implications of fragmentation and repetition, whose use represents in different ways the complex relationship of the main character with her mother. Scenes will be analyzed with emphasis on the resources available in the narrative, whose concern for forms is a pillar within the narrative fabric, in addition to reconstructing a complex and fractured relationship. This reconstruction brings together the rubble in the relationship between mother and daughter that the narrator and main character of Quienes somos ahora carries with them.

Mask, Nationalism and Parody in “Las doce figuras del mundo” by Honorio Bustos Domecq

Heladio Colín Medina — 2025-01-27

This article explores how, from a merely police structure of "Las doce figuras del mundo", through a mask (Honorio Bustos Domecq), Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares insert a rereading of the right-wing nationalism of the Argentine Infamous Decade. With this purpose, the authors used two parodies; first, the classical police canon (narrative structure), and then, the right-wing nationalism. Thus, it has been found that it is a narrative with the intention of social criticism.

The Return of the Undead: Vegetable vampires, Fantastic plants, Botanical monstrifications in “La orquídea” by León Fernández Guardia and “Orquídea” by Andrés F. Wassington

Kimberly Huertas Arredondo — 2025-01-27

In this article we analyze the vegetable vampirism in "La orquídea" (1907) by the Costa Rican writer León Fernández Guardia and "Orquídea" (2006) by the Argentinean Andrés Federico Wassington,through theoretical-methodological tools from comparative literature (tematology), botany, plant-horror and Ecogothic. This critical perspective allows us to argue that these stories are, perhaps, the first texts of the vegetal fantastic in Latin American literature, interested in reproducing, explicitly and during the twentieth and twenty-first century, the figure of the vampire, from the orchidological flora. The selected textualities bring a renewal of the specificity of the discourse of the fantastic, while offering a new look through the insertion of new codes that revive and resignify the modern monstrous plant and, in passing, the vampire monster manifested in the European gothic-fantastic vampire tradition, precisely with the tropicalization of the feeling or effect of the fantastic (i.e., the monstrosity of the character, the grotesque and the abject body) and the incorporation of vegetable vampires.

Considerations on the children's story in Central America

Silvia Palma Campos — 2025-01-27

Central American stories are characterized by the folklore of the twentieth century, but are more contemporary, creative and innovative in the twenty-first century. This essay compiles a series of works of stories for children in Central America, except Belize, in order to expose some of the most significant stories of the Central American isthmus and show their transcendence in the history of literature for children in each country through time. For this reason, the document includes images of storybooks that have been published and that represent part of this field. It is determined that Central American stories for children have evolved and there are more authors in this area; besides more children's publishing houses have been created, more contests and congresses have been held, providing more encouragement and animation to reading.

Typological Observations on Synesthetic Sound Symbolism in the Indigenous Languages of Colombia

Linda Almanza Pumarejo — 2025-01-27

Synesthetic sound symbolism is identified in the connection between phonetic patterns and non-auditory elements, such as colors, textures, shapes, smells, and flavors. This study analyzes the characteristics of this type of sound association in indigenous languages of Colombia through structural and areal typology criteria. To achieve this, Swadesh lists from 36 languages that met comparable visual criteria were analyzed, along with the acoustic properties of vowels and consonants. The results were gathered to generate maps, proposing two areal sets: the minimum separation between the colombian macroarea and the Guajira Peninsula, and a quadripartite group which is formed by the Wayuunaiki zone, the Vaupés, Andoque, and the western periphery zone; the Gente de Centro (Echeverri, 2022) and Vichada zone, and the set of most of the Andean zone with discontinuous Eastern Amazonian zone. Regarding the structural level, the study finds that voiceless consonants are often used to express smallness, luminosity, and pointed shapes, while open vowels are the most common sound class to represent ideas related to greatness, darkness, and roundness.

The Diathesis in the Spanish Sports Press in Catalan and Spanish: A Tool of Exclusion?

Jannis Harjus — 2025-01-27

Partiality and constructions of rivalry are expressed on various levels in Spanish sports newspapers. Based on a corpus of more than 500 newspaper texts, this article examines the extent to which deagentivations through diatheses and rearrangements of semantic roles generate partiality in the Spanish and Catalan sports press in Spain. In these media discourses on the so-called clásico of Spanish soccer, Real Madrid versus FC Barcelona, the ‘other’ team and the ‘other’ footballers are often denied taking the role of an agent. Instead, they are deagentified by resorting to recessive, passive and se-diatheses, in Catalan sometimes carried out as es. The same applies to supposedly altered semantic roles, i.e., the redistribution of the syntactic structure on the surface structure of a sentence could give the recipient of the text the impression that an action or a process has the agent position ―although de facto, of course, it does not― or an apparently intrinsic force that manages without the actual acting agent.

Acquisition of The Tap-Trill-Lateral Contrast by Speakers of L1 Cantonese-L2 Spanish

2025-01-27

In the present study an assessment of the on-target and off-target production of liquids (laterals and rhotics) is undertaken in a corpus of second language (L2) Spanish. The Chinese-origin participants have immigrated to Mexicali, Mexico where they have acquired L2 Spanish in a natural setting. As a major aim, a quantitative analysis of the data is performed to determine the production of on-target and off-target articulations in lateral, tap, thrill, and syllable-coda rhotic. Internal and external factors are considered in the analysis; for example, liquid production in syllable onset, coda and consonant clusters was considered. The data were subjected to two variable rule analyses to determine factors that favored off-target articulations. Type of liquid sound, phonotactic context, education in Mexico, number of years in Mexico, and the Chinese varieties spoken all were determined significant in the production of off-target articulations. The naturalistic Spanish L2 data confirm a wide-ranging phonological diversity that was overwhelmingly produced in line with target language patterns. The production of on-target and off-target articulations was constrained by the articulatory ease and difficulty that participants face.

Proposal for a Flipped Classroom Strategy for Teaching Academic Writing at the University Level

Karla Ramos-Rivas — 2025-01-27

Writing in the academic environment is not only practicing the skills, strategies or resources acquired in secondary education. Contrary to what students believe, writing at university requires mastering this competence in order to access social practices located in the specific disciplinary field, in which it will be necessary to master the construction of rhetorical, syntactic and discursive structures. The teaching of academic writing becomes the ideal content to be approached by means of didactic strategies of practical modality such as the inverted classroom. Much of the failure in the teaching of writing lies in the fact that it has not been treated as a procedural content that requires abundant practice and the conscious analysis of errors, since students face a complex socio-cognitive process. Thus, this article offers a proposal of a didactic strategy of inverted classroom for the teaching and evaluation of academic writing at the university level, which was used during the second semester of 2023 at the University of Costa Rica.

Analysis of the Spanish Translation of Chinese Idioms in Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Mingwei Wang — 2025-01-27

Romance de los Tres Reinos, una de las cuatro grandes obras clásicas de la literatura china, destaca por su lenguaje conciso y su uso extenso de modismos chinos. La traducción de estos modismos al español representa un reto debido a las diferencias culturales entre China y los países hispanohablantes. El presente trabajo se enfoca en la traducción al español de los modismos en Romance de los Tres Reinos. Con la ayuda del corpus paralelo y tomando la eco-traductología (propuesta por Hu Gengshen en 2001, como citado en Hu, 2008) como base teórica, exploramos las estrategias de su traducción desde tres dimensiones: la lingüística, la cultural y la comunicativa. Descubrimos que las traducciones con una acción coordinada de transformación tridimensional permiten a los lectores hispanohablantes comprender mejor los modismos chinos. Esperamos que el presente trabajo contribuya al estudio de la traducción chino-español de los modismos en general y en otras obras literarias.