In the literature, the universal definite quantifier ambos ‘both’, unlike its equivalent os dois ‘the two’, is regarded as almost exclusively distributive, inasmuch as it blocks collective readings, except in a few special contexts. These include instrumental adjuncts (as in the counterpart of ‘he lifted the box with both hands’) and, only for some speakers, operators of the type of mesmo ‘same’ (as in the counterpart of ‘they both attend the same school’). Sentences with ambos and collectivizing predicates, such as symmetric adjectives (diferente ‘different’), reciprocal operators (um com o outro ‘each other’), collectivizing adverbials (em conjunto ‘together’), quasi-divisible predicates (unir esforços ‘join efforts’) or indivisible predicates (somar 12 ‘equal 12’) are generally considered anomalous. In this paper, the use of ambos in contemporary standard (mainly European) Portuguese is assessed, taking into account all these critical contexts. The observation of data from contemporary newspaper writing and from literary text (of the past 500 years) and the data from a survey among 20 native speakers (linguistic experts) shows that this is an area of exceptionally intense linguistic variation, where signs of significant linguistic change are additionally observed.

This paper is dedicated to the study of the common vocabulary between Galician and Asturian-Leonese, and also Castilian, during the Middle Ages, with the aim of showing the existence of the linguistic continuum in the northwest of the Peninsula at the lexical level. We focus on two very specific semantic fields: the units of measurement and containers, on the one hand, and the rural areas on the other. In our study, we used a corpus comprising more than 160 documents written throughout the 15th century in Vega de Espinareda and other towns in El Bierzo, preserved in the National Historical Archive of Spain. We analyze the etymology of each word selected, its geographical extension, and its first documentation in both Asturian-Leonese and Galician as well as in other Peninsular romances. To this purpose, we use various online dictionaries as well as other online lexicographic repertoires and linguistic corpora.

At the end of the twentieth century, London and Madrid became large cities with a high proportion of young, limmigrant population coming from different countries and cultures. This had a great impact on their linguistic landscape with the creation of a multiethnolect. As a result, a new language variety known as Multicultural London English emerged in London. In the case of Madrid, the conglomerate of speakers from different origins and linguistic minorities is not so visible although this condition also had a bearing on the variety of Spanish spoken here. This paper focuses on the role of language contact and cases of linguistic innovation. We analyse samples extracted from different youth language corpora, such as COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage English) and LEC (London English Corpus) for English, and COLAm (Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid) for Spanish. The findings indicate that, in the case of Multicultural London English, there are many terms of Caribbean origin together with some others from Arabic, American English slang, Spanish, Italian, and French. In the variety of Spanish spoken in Madrid we also identify terms from other dialects of Spanish together with words from English and from other speakers belonging to marginal sectors of society. Examples of innovation in the use of quotatives as well as in the categories of intensifiers, invariant tags, vocatives, clipped forms, etc., are also singled out and discussed. This paper confirms that language contact plus a young and an ethnically diverse population constitute the perfect combination for innovation and language change.

In 1801, during the War of the Oranges, the Portuguese territory of Olivenza was occupied by troops commanded by Manuel Godoy, thus becoming administered by Spain (Treaty of Badajoz, 1801). This change of sovereignty also brought about profound changes in various aspects of life in this territory next to the river Guadiana, including linguistic aspects. In this context, Castilian displaced Portuguese and became the language of the new administration, relegating the Portuguese language to a secondary role. After more than two centuries, Portuguese is currently in a precarious situation, where protection measures are scarce or non-existent and the legal framework is practically absent.

This paper presents the results of a research on the sociolinguistic situation of Olivenza. The focus of this research is on the role that linguistic attitudes play in the sociolinguistic situation of Portuguese in the city of Olivenza. In order to achieve this objective, we present an analysis of the linguistic usages and attitudes extracted from a corpus of interviews conducted with citizens of the city of Olivenza. The preliminary results reveal that Portuguese in Olivenza is in a clear situation of minoritization and that the linguistic attitudes of the people of Olivenza are not generally very favourable to the use and preservation of the Portuguese language.

This study presents a novel approach to investigating implicit and explicit attitudes towards Traditional Galician and Galician Spanish by means of data triangulation. Unlike prior research, we first depart from the Implicit Association Test (IAT) results to determine the participants’ implicit biases. Then, we carried out four semi-structured interviews as well as a focus group with six participants – selected according to the biases obtained in the IAT. The results indicate that implicit attitudes are less homogeneous than explicit ones, confirming that languages in Galicia continue to present a clear indexical value. Moreover, detected biases in the IAT predominantly align with linguistic variables, particularly family language and everyday language in different contexts. These results highlight the relationship between attitudes towards languages and language use. At an explicit level, the discourse is quite homogeneous, generally favorable to Galician, but primarily indeterminate. However, we detect the maintenance of certain prejudices among L-1 Castilian speakers, prejudices which L-1 Galician speakers are unable to challenge, placing themselves in the same framework as the former.