DIEGO LÓPEZ BLÁZQUEZ

Universidad Complutense

To be or not to be... Effeminate

Análisis del Discurso

At the beginning the only option was the closet. Homosexuality was such a disgusting issue to be treated, such a condemnable sin, such an unmanly option that the best place for it was hidden in silence: it did not matter the existence of homosexuality per se but its visibility.

In order to avoid the homophobic consequences of been discovered a homosexual gay men and lesbians women began to develop certain codes that allowed them to recognize those who were like them. Among other things, specific kinds of words, rings, or even clothes at the back’s pocket could be signals denoting homosexuality, and the way of speaking and acting was not something different.

The camp discourse takes homosexual men to adopt a way of speaking and acting similar to that traditionally associated with women, and this is the point of depart of the research. The phenomenon analyzed is the use of feminine words to speak about masculine or entities trying to relate it to the actual homosexual model: the camp model.

The researched is thought to be contrastive Spanish – English to compare the difference between a language with feminine inflections (Spanish) and other not having them (English).

Acquisition of English inside a Spanish context

Sociolingüística

The study of bilingualism and the acquisition of a second language deal most of times with either children having parents speaking different languages, or they (children) living in a country where a different language from that of the parents is spoken. This paper is the beginning part of a larger research dealing with the acquisition of English as a second language inside a context where neither the parents speak a different language one from the other, nor they speak a different language from the community’s one.

It would nearly correspond with the type 5 of bilingualism, “non-native parents”, from the list established by Romaine (1989), but here the person addressing the child in a different language will not be any of the parents but me. English is the language used to addressed not only the child but any member of the family, thus following the principle “one person - one language” introduced by Ronjat (1913).

The research is being carried out over a Spanish baby boy since his birth day in February 2004, inside a middle-class family living in Fuenlabrada, a city in the south of Madrid.

Asociación de Jóvenes Lingüistas
ajl2006@gmail.com