Literal language is commonly defined in terms of direct meaning, i.e., any literal utterance must convey a unique meaning. Such meaning has to be the one conventionally accepted to guarantee a successful communication. Figurative language, on the other hand, could be regarded as the opposite of literal language. Thus, whereas the latter is assumed to communicate a direct and explicit meaning, figurative language is related to the communication of veiled or implicit meanings. For instance, the word pozolero (stewmaker), which literally refers to a person who cooks a traditional Mexican food, when it is used in a figurative utterance, it can refer to different concepts, which are hardly related to food. Therefore, it can work instead of hitman, murderer, drug dealer, and others, in such a way its literal meaning is intentionally deviated in favor of secondary interpretations. In this regard, we are focused on analyzing the use of figurative language in an atypical context: drug trafficking. To this end, a corpus about narco language in Spanish was built. This corpus was used to train a word embedding model to identify creative ways to name narco-related concepts. The results show that various concepts are commonly expressed through figurative devices, such as metaphor, metonymy, or mental imagery. This fact corroborates that figurative language is quite recurrent in our daily communication, regardless of the context. In addition, we show how this creativity can be recognized by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

Language, in all its forms, is one of the most comprehensive ways to characterize human societies. By means of the analysis of regular components, either at phonetic, morphological, syntactic or semantic level, human language provides valuable information that can be translated into knowledge in order to represent behavioral patterns. For instance, in web texts, such as the ones posted on Twitter or Facebook, it is quite frequent to find linguistic expressions, such as the following one: “Don’t come here. If you are afraid for your life and you have no place to go, don’t pick this country.” This text could denote an explicit description of the current immigration phenomenon and, likewise, it could connote an implicit content of mockery, aggressiveness, or even hate. Both interpretations are possible, but only one of them is more likely according to the author profiling. This fact stresses out the underlying problem that it is faced in this investigation: Many of our utterances entail two communicative dimensions. The explicit dimension (literal use of language), and the implicit dimension (figurative use of language). Both dimensions are supposed to communicate information thought consciously. In this respect, the most challenging issue for this approach relies on the recognition of the correct communicative dimension profiled by the author in a web text. In this context, this article focuses on analyzing textual information, mainly extracted from Twitter, in order to set a computational framework to differentiate between explicit and implicit language. In particular, we are interested in recognizing figurative uses regarding irony and sarcasm, in order to apply the findings to better understand and prevent social problems related to hate speech.

Una de las características notables del léxico de las drogas es su naturaleza figurativa, debido a su carácter críptico, pero también como reflejo de la creatividad de los sujetos implicados. Si bien este tipo de léxico ha sido de interés para la prensa, la lingüística y la literatura, el léxico de las drogas es elusivo por la velocidad con que se transforma. En el presente trabajo se analizan los mecanismos cognitivos involucrados en la neología y la resemantización de nombres de drogas, tanto en idioma inglés como en español. Específicamente las metáforas y las metonimias conceptuales. Dichos mecanismos cognitivos nos permiten identificar algunos patrones en los cuales se agrupa una gran cantidad de expresiones referentes a las drogas, lo cual pretende aportar a la comprensión de este tipo de léxico que, al involucrar dos lenguas, ofrece también una visión comparativa de ambas culturas con respecto a este ámbito. One of the notable characteristics of the drug lexicon is its figurative nature, due to its crypticity, but also as a reflection of the creativity of the subjects involved. Although this type of lexicon has been of interest to the press, linguistics and literature, the lexicon of drugs is elusive because of the speed with which it is transformed. The present work analyzes the cognitive mechanisms involved in the neology and the semantic transformation of drug names, both in English and Spanish; specifically, metaphors and conceptual metonymies. These cognitive mechanisms allow us to identify some patterns in which many expressions referring to drugs are grouped, which aims to contribute to the understanding of this type of lexicon that, by involving two languages, also offers a comparative vision of both cultures regarding this area.

El aprendizaje de lenguas se caracteriza por coadyuvar a los alumnos en el desarrollo de la competencia lingüística. Así, el alumno interactúa y es capaz de comunicarse de forma eficiente en situaciones reales. No obstante, el apartado metafórico en el aprendizaje es poco explorado por los profesores de lenguas, en muchos casos. Actualmente, estudios, como los de Acquaroni (2008), Lamartí (2011) y Domínguez (2020), evidencian que la metáfora juega un papel más significativo del que se tiene contemplado. Aunado a esto, el papel de la cultura en la metáfora y los procesos cognitivos son elementos relevantes y cruciales que deberían incluirse en la enseñanza de lenguas. De ahí, la importancia de este trabajo en donde se analiza el papel de la cultura y la sociedad en los procesos metafóricos y el aprendizaje del idioma inglés. Esta investigación con enfoque cualitativo y con alcance descriptivo muestra resultados que sustentan la hipótesis de que existen elementos socioculturales en la L1 que generan, o inhiben, la interferencia lingüística, y se evidencian en el desarrollo de la competencia metafórica en L2. Los cambios en los contextos sociolingüísticos, las nuevas técnicas de enseñanza, así como sus enfoques, y el acercamiento que los alumnos tienen con distintos elementos lingüísticos ajenos a su propia lengua, predicen el surgimiento de fenómenos cognitivos que pueden dar pie a nuevas estrategias en el uso de las metáforas y, según Lakoff y Johnson (2003), muchas de las actividades diarias (discutir, resolver problemas, organizar el tiempo, etcétera) son metáforas en su naturaleza.

Loanword Research on Anglicisms has largely centered on lexical borrowing and phonological adaptation, with comparatively limited attention to morphosyntactic integration in recipient grammars. This study examines the syntactic behavior of single-word Anglicisms in Mexican Spanish, drawing on phonetically classified corpora of 131 monosyllabic Anglicisms with mon-ophthongs extracted from spontaneous speech by Spanish–English bilinguals in the Tijuana–San Diego border region. Building on prior acoustic analyses based on F1 and F2 vowel measure-ments, the study investigates the relationship between phonological adaptation and morphosyn-tactic integration. Results reveal a gradient pattern of incorporation. Anglicisms exhibiting Span-ish-like phonetic properties tend to occupy canonical syntactic positions and show greater com-patibility with Spanish functional morphology, whereas phonetically non-adapted forms more frequently resist morphological marking and display island-like behavior within otherwise Spanish clauses. The analysis examines distribution across nominal, adjectival, and prepositional domains, as well as object positions, enabling a fine-grained assessment of degrees of morpho-syntactic integration. The former is illustrated as follows: (1) Guardo cash ([kaʃ]) por si acaso (2) Si hacen match ([mæʧ]), puede funcionar Adopting a usage-based and contact-oriented perspective for syntactic borrowing (Bybee, 2015), the study is situated within the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Muysken, 2000) and recent approaches to insertional borrowing (Poplack & Dion, 2012; Onysko & Win-ter-Froemel, 2011). A central contribution lies in establishing a principled link between morpho-syntactic behavior and an independently motivated phonetic classification, offering convergent evidence for the systematic integration of Anglicisms into Spanish grammar. At a broader ana-lytical level, the study advances debates on syntactic borrowing and contact-induced change by demonstrating that Anglicisms are subject to Spanish morphosyntactic constraints rather than functioning as unconstrained lexical insertions, and by developing an interface-based account of borrowing that captures the gradient nature of grammatical incorporation in contact settings and contributes a corpus-based, empirically grounded perspective to typologies of borrowing in Spanish contact linguistics.

Este estudio compara la frecuencia de uso de el/la + antropónimos y su forma escueta en muestras orales de Ciudad de México, Mexicali y Monterrey, en tres niveles de análisis: diatópico, diafásico y diastrático. El objetivo es identificar las motivaciones del uso de artículo definido ante antropónimos en el nivel diatópico, diafásico y diastrático en las tres muestras mencionadas. Lo anterior se realizó analizando instancias de antropónimos escuetos y con artículo definido en conversaciones espontáneas (Ameresco) y entrevistas semidirigidas (PRESEEA) de Ciudad de México, Mexicali y Monterrey. El artículo propone que el uso de la estructura en México responde a factores de corte diatópico, diafásico y diastrático: 1) la muestra de Mexicali presenta mayor uso en comparación con las otras dos, 2) existe una mayor presencia de el/la + antropónimo en conversaciones espontáneas que en entrevistas semidirigidas (MEX y MTY) y 3) el uso de artículo + antropónimo está estratificado en la muestra de Mexicali.