This summary is taken from the speech given by Daniel Cassany at the I. Cervantes in Berlin (Germany), when I was chewing over the idea of analyzing how well we generally manage the spanish cultural promotion abroad.
Inside a speech called "Interlinguistc Contrastive Rhetoric", Cassany pointed out the foundational study of Kaplan (1966) about the paragraph organization at the essay, willing to study the interferences of rhetoric uses and mother culture on different groups of english students.
About the spanish language characteristics in relation with the english:
· Grave & Kaplan, 1996: They quoted several studies inferring that the spanish academic prose uses longer and more sophisticated sentences than the english on.
· Vázquez, 2001: Rhetoric differences between spanish an english scientific articles: * At the spanish ones, the examples doesn't get such important function as the english, which act as text engine. * At the spanish ones there find more depersonalized references, that cause problems to non-hispanic readers. * At the spanish, disagreements are scarce, which suggest an existence of an implicit courtesy rule regarding to the negative quotations.
· Connor, 1996: Quotes several investigations: * Native Spanish speakers prefer an elaborated and ornamental language, with tendency to free associations between clauses, in studies with several individuals (Mexicans, Ecuadorians and north-american Anglophobe natives), on different levels (university and elemental). * Native Spanish speakers write longer sentences, with more pronouns and loose coordination preferences. * A group of Mexican students, writing essays, used longer sentences, more inferential or run-on sentences, more synonyms, less simple sentences and more additive and causal conjunctions - unlike north-american students writing an equivalent text, with simples sentences and less synonyms.
website of Daniel Cassany (spanish & catalan -some texts in english-)
Si todos mis planes son correctos, para el final de Febrero comenzaré una serie de grabaciones en diferentes instituciones. Este es el siguiente paso del proyecto. Por ahora estoy intentando llegar a cada persona y el esfuerzo comienza a dar sus resultados. Después de una primera tentativa que acabó por congelar todo mi equipo, ahora no hay tiempo que perder.
