LETRAS

Presentation Letras 106

José Gabriel Figuera Contreras — 2025-07-01

A cartoonist in the mist

Yanira Yánez Delgado — 2025-07-01

Arroyo Hernández, I. y Costa León, P. R. (Eds.). (2024). Partido a partido: La lengua del fútbol. Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 198 págs.

Iván Raymundo — 2025-07-01

Lasarte Valcárcel, F. J. (2020). Narrativa venezolana del siglo XX: Identidad/fabulación (Paisaje sin Gallegos). DELA(u)TOR - 1 (republicación), 57 págs.

Vanessa Anaís Hidalgo — 2025-07-01

Lexicographical remarks on José Manuel Montenegro's Glossary of Barbarisms

Lourdes Ángela Díaz Blanca — 2025-07-01

The concern of intellectuals about the preservation of language, as an identity product that reflects a social reality, is part of a trend in which different authors are inserted in the late nineteenth century and on the eve of the twentieth century. In this sense, we find José Manuel Montenegro, journalist, lawyer, liberal leader, parliamentarian and civil servant, who, between 23 October 1903 and 7 April 1904, published in Los Ecos de Cojedes: ‘Barbarismos que se usan en Venezuela. Obra inéditaa por el Doctor José Manuel Montenegro’. Given Montenegro's significance as a journalist, lawyer, liberal leader, parliamentarian, and civil servant, and the limited scholarship on his ideology, this research offers a concise overview of his political and intellectual contributions, alongside a modest lexicographical analysis of his glossary: ‘Barbarismos que se usan en Venezuela’. The study describes purist attitudes evident in the commentary on various entries within the work. Methodologically, this is a documentary study drawing upon Haensch's (1997) lexicographical criticism, analyzing a corpus of 223 lexicographical articles. The findings indicate that Montenegro not only illustrates linguistic variations within the socio-historical transformations of his era but also captures and reflects the public's perception of language as an identity marker. A review of the lexicon reveals a pronounced prescriptivist stance against perceived deviations from linguistic norms. The acknowledgement and dissemination of contemporary "barbarisms" through the press likely fostered linguistic awareness, navigating between an embrace of novelty and adherence to tradition.

The last revolutionary: Ernesto, dramatic text by Rafael Minvielle

Jorge Rueda Castro — 2025-07-01

This article carries out a textual analysis of the selected play. Within the framework of such methodology, we will work in terms of semantic macrostructures; that is, themes and macro- propositions as basic categories. The above aims to demonstrate that El mundo dramático de Ernesto, a work written and published in 1842 by the Spaniard living in Chile, Rafael Minvielle, was a creation that revealed and disseminated the ideologies that reproduced or resisted power through its two main characters. Consequently, the reading developed is based on the premise that Minvielle's dramatic composition, directly influenced by the context of production and as a political instrument at the service of the recent nation, instills a set of values and aspirations that interpret the country's feelings. At the time of the publication of the text, the country was emerging from a period of transition and instability (revolutionary struggle for independence, prior to the 1920s, plus the subsequent civil war of 1829-30), and was looking for principles that would allow it to project itself with certainty into the civil and political future.

Phonological awareness and its incidence in the initial learning of reading

Erika Andrea Muñoz Espinoza — 2025-07-01

This study addresses the critical gap in early childhood education concerning phonological awareness, aiming to evaluate the impact of a targeted intervention on the development of pre-reading skills in preschool children. A total of 21 children, aged 4 to 6 years, attending an educational center in Cuenca, Ecuador, participated in an intervention consisting of 22 sessions designed to stimulate phonological awareness. Employing a quantitative approach with a pre-experimental pretest-posttest design, the study utilized the Phonological Knowledge Test (PECO, Ramos and Cuadrado, 2006) and the Initial Reading Test (PLEI, Duchimasa and Bojorque, 2020), both validated for the Ecuadorian child population. Statistical analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between enhanced phonological awareness tasks and improved pre-reading skills following the intervention. Furthermore, the intervention demonstrably improved scores on the phonological awareness test and its sub-dimensions, underscoring its potential efficacy in pedagogical practice for fostering early reading foundational skills. This research concludes that the deliberate development of phonological awareness in young children is a crucial contributor to the successful acquisition of emergent literacy, thereby benefiting their overall early learning trajectory.

Hispanic lexicography in Paraguay

Isabel Baca de Espinola — 2025-07-01

In this paper we intend to explain the late development of Hispanic lexicography in Paraguay, a phenomenon attributable to a confluence of historical and linguistic factors. Paraguayan Guarani or Avá n̅e'e has survived for five centuries and is spoken today by seven million mestizos in Paraguay alone, establishing a profound bilingualism through its enduring coexistence with Spanish. Historically, the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in 1587, notably Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—a pioneering lexicographer of Guarani—marked a period where the colonizers actively learned Guarani for indigenous religious instruction, leading to an absence of overt linguistic conflict during the colonial era. Post-independence, there was a radical shifting in linguistic policies: Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the first president, prioritized Guarani and pursued national production, whilst isolating the country; whereas his successor, Carlos Antonio López, promoted Castilianization to foster international trade relations. Subsequently, under Francisco Solano López— Carlos López’s son—, Guarani was reinstated as a vital military communication tool during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), yet this period was followed by a severe discrimination against the language. It was not until the administrations of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly under Eligio Ayala, that a concerted effort towards the harmonious coexistence of both languages was re-established, a linguistic equilibrium that persists to this day. We thus conclude that the future advancement of Spanish lexicography in Paraguay necessitates a thorough consideration of the intricate relationship of interference and complementarity between Spanish and Guarani.

Central American female poetry in times of revolution: a gynocritical analysis

Nehemías Antonio Aguilera López — 2025-07-01

This article analyzes the construction of Central American poetic discourse from a feminine perspective. We draw upon a carefully delimited corpus of poems, specifically selecting works from Gioconda Belli's Sobre la grama (1998), Claribel Alegría's Sobrevivo (1978), Ana María Rodas's Poemas de la izquierda erótica (1998), Elsie Alvarado de Ricord's Es real y es de este mundo (2002), Carmen Naranjo's Mi guerrilla (1977), and Juana Pavón's Antología Poética (1998). Theoretically, this study is grounded in gynocriticism, adopting Showalter's framework with a specific focus on cultural difference. Our qualitative methodology centers on the textual analysis of these selected works, emphasizing the discursive strategies that illuminate the authors' stances toward prevailing sociocultural systems. The analysis reveals that the interplay between these women writers and their unique contexts profoundly shapes both their individual development and their literary output. Ultimately, we conclude that the poetic discourses exhibit expressive variations—at times challenging established norms and at other times integrating within them—contingent upon each author's specific national and social environment.

Formative novels with a homosexual theme. Conformation of literary criteria from three Colombian novels

Oscar Mauricio Caballero Vargas — 2025-07-01

The Bildungsroman or didactic novels have played a pedagogical, social and personal role through the fictionalization of human development. In these novels, the central character goes through an inner and outer journey in which he faces the trials of society until he reaches adulthood. In other types of formative novels, which can be classified as didactic novels with a homosexual theme (NFTH), the journey is crueller and is marked by humiliations, social crushing and denial. To study this phenomenon, an analysis of three Colombian novels was carried out with the objective of proposing literary criteria for homosexual-themed formative novels. International, Latin American and Colombian works were examined to detect characteristics of themes, characters and narrative purposes. Macro- categories were elaborated and then a hermeneutic analysis method was applied to the corpus of analysis constituted by Un beso de Dick by Fernando Molano Vargas, Los hombres no van juntos al cine by Manuel Valdivieso and Ruega por nosotros by Alfonso Carvajal. Finally, five criteria that characterize the formative novels with a homosexual theme were formed: 1) the NFTH as an element of study of a country; 2) vigor of homoeroticism and corporeality; 3) spiritual commotion of the protagonist; 4) presence of insult and, finally, 5) subalternity in the canon. Our contribution aims to favor flexibility in the study of literature, to search for critical paradigms and to learn to work with novel proposals in the field of pedagogical reading.

From the edges: voice and paratext in the narrative construction of Jacqueline Goldberg's The clear hours (2013)

María del Carmen Porras — 2025-07-01

This paper presents a close and comprehensive reading of the novel Las horas claras in order to account for its complex narrative framework. As a matter of fact, we consider that, in this work, the constant appeal to the resource of paratext (Gérard Genette) is a function of a dialogic (Mikhail Bakhtin) and intertextual (Julia Kristeva) narrative. Thus, Las horas claras becomes a sort of battlefield between voices that emerge not only from the central body of the work, but also from multiple paratexts, which, rather than accompanying or limiting it, expand its meaning and give it depth. Las horas claras, then, more than the recounting of the small history of an egregious house, should be considered the story of struggle and survival of a voice: that of Madame Savoye.

Appreciative suffixes in rural Honduras: a morphopragmatic perspective

Ruth Isabel Gámez Ramos — 2025-07-01

This research analyzes the appreciative suffixes used by speakers of the dialectal variants in San Francisco (Lempira) and Villa Santa (El Paraíso), Honduras. The study is grounded in Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi's (1994, 2011) morphopragmatic theory and Reynoso Noverón's (2005) semantic-pragmatic typology. For data collection, we engaged 12 direct informants, each linked to 6 indirect informants, totaling 72 participants. These participants generated 576 phrases through spontaneous conversations within family and friendship settings. The qualitative and quantitative data analysis considered variables such as age, gender, and the level of solidarity among interlocutors. The results confirm that the most frequent appreciative suffixes are -ito/a, -illo/a, -ón/ona, and -ote/ota. Through these suffixes, speakers express pragmatic functions including irony, attenuation, politeness, quantification, and centralizing, decentralizing, positive, and negative valuations.

Acts of the I Latin American Conference on Lexicography

José Gabriel Figuera Contreras — 2025-07-01

Este documento contiene las actas de la I Jornada Latinoamericana de Lexicografía, un evento académico virtual realizado los días 9 y 10 de mayo de 2024 que reunió a destacados especialistas en lexicografía y lingüística del ámbito hispanoamericano.

El comité organizador estuvo conformado por:

Johanna Rivero Belisario (Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Lingüísticas y Literarias “Andrés Bello”, Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador, Venezuela).

Estela Peralta de Aguayo (Instituto Superior de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Asunción, Paraguay; Universidad Autónoma de Asunción, Paraguay).

Lirian Ciro (Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Departamento de Lingüística y Filología, Universidad del Valle, Colombia).

Camilo Rengifo (Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Departamento de Lingüística y Filología, Universidad del Valle, Colombia).

El evento contó con 15 conferencias, 31 ponencias y más de 200 personas inscritas como asistentes.

Estas actas incluyen las síntesis de algunas de las conferencias presentadas durante el evento, abarcando una amplia gama de temas relacionados con la lexicografía en América Latina. Entre los tópicos tratados se encuentran:

La historia y evolución de los diccionarios hispanoamericanos.
Los retos y desafíos actuales de la lexicografía en América Latina.
El análisis de obras lexicográficas específicas de diversos países.
La incorporación del léxico americano en los diccionarios generales del español.
El estudio de glosarios literarios y especializados.
La lexicografía de lenguas indígenas americanas.
Los procesos de diccionarización en diferentes países.
La relación entre lexicografía, política lingüística e identidad cultural.

Este compendio ofrece una valiosa muestra del estado actual de la investigación lexicográfica en Hispanoamérica y constituye un importante aporte para el desarrollo de esta disciplina en la región. Las reflexiones y análisis presentados sientan las bases para futuros estudios y colaboraciones en el campo de la lexicografía latinoamericana.

Finalmente, también adjuntamos los afiches de los conferencistas y el programa completo del evento.

Trayectoria de una maestra de escuela en el Instituto Pedagógico de Caracas

Lucía Esther Fraca de Barrera — 2025-07-01

El número tres perfecto es

Luis Barrera Linares — 2025-07-01

Minelia Villalba de Ledezma: Maestra de maestros

Anneris Pérez de Pérez — 2025-07-01

Labyrinths of grammatical research in Venezuela? Obstacles and opportunities

César Villegas Santana — 2025-07-01

Today I have been invited to share with you within the framework of the sixtieth anniversary of the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Lingüísticas y Literarias Andrés Bello and the sixty-sixth anniversary of a colossal journal, the magazine Letras, which is now in its 105th issue, with a committed periodicity. In addition, this session is a heartfelt recognition to Minelia Villalba de Ledezma, who dedicated her academic life to linguistic research and education, of whom I was a disciple and received my first lessons in grammatical subjects at the university level. In some cases, I have wanted to speak a little from my experience, from the work I have done, within the framework of what I believe determines us in the field of grammatical research in our country.