All studies of speakers who learn, know, and use more than one language – multi-competent language users (Cook, 1991) – show that languages do not exist in isolation but rather interact, affect, and change each other. I will discuss a particular case of such interaction, namely convergence, where two languages in contact in an individual mind become more similar to each other. Convergence has traditionally been studied only in speech and only in longstanding functional bilinguals. However, recent developments in gesture studies show that speech and speech-related gestures form an integrated system. This in turn suggests that language interaction may also be a multimodal phenomenon. Using the expression of motion as a test domain, I will present data from functional bilinguals, and from intermediate L2 users in both of their languages in within-subject designs. I will illustrate 1) that convergence is multimodal in that language interaction is visible in both speech and gesture; and 2) that multimodal analyses can reveal convergence where it is not seen in speech both in first and second language contexts. This last point critically highlights that convergence or language interaction is pervasive, and is found not only in functional bilingualism, but also in first and second language use. Analyses of multimodal convergence thus have important implications for our models of language use and learning.

A corpus-based approach will be adopted to compare data on the speech of teenagers and adults over the period from the 1990s to 2015, analysing tokens extracted from several comparable corpora, including COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language), LIC (Linguistic Innovators Corpus), DCPSE (Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English) and BNC2014 (Spoken British National Corpus). In the first part, attention will be paid to general extenders by exploring their frequency in the expression of these two groups of speakers and looking closely at their behaviour in discourse. The second part will be devoted to a similar study of placeholders. Following this, in the third part, some contrastive notes will be made with (European) Spanish; here, data from COLAm (Corpus oral del lenguaje adolescente de Madrid) and CORPES XXI will be analysed. The findings of this research show that general extenders and placeholders are frequent in the language of teenagers and adults, although these two sets of speakers differ in certain patterns of use. Some general extenders (and stuff, or something) and placeholders (thingy) are more frequent in teen talk. However, the opposite applies to some other extenders (and things, and so on) and placeholders (so and so, whatsname), which occur more frequently in the speech of adults. General extenders perform not only a set-marking or classificatory function, but also serve to express interpersonal relationships between speakers, as well as to organise discourse, in which they adopt roles typical of general discourse markers. As regards placeholders, a total of 13 were recorded in the data, with a notable increase in the evolution of their use over the last twenty-five years for both teens and adults. Some of these placeholders are more common in teen talk (thingy, thingymajig) whereas others (so and so) are found more frequently in the expression of adults. The importance of these words lies in their pragmatics rather than in their semantics, in that they can fulfil a number of communicative purposes, such as not sounding too pompous or pretentious, expressing euphemism, marking a speaker’s derogatory intentions, making insults, etc. The findings reported here also show that these items are used in teen talk in a wider range of situations and contexts than in the language of adults. Finally, similar trends are identified in (European) Spanish regarding the pragmatic behaviour of the expressions under analysis, which again may also undergo similar processes of grammaticalisation.

Changing constructs. The case of writing.

In applied linguistic research one of the major challenges is operationalizing our core variables, often (features of) participants’ first, second or foreign language proficiency. We theorize about these variables and build cognitive processing models that feed into measurement procedures, with the goal of developing valid and reliable measurements of the constructs we want to target. The complexity of this process makes designing valid measurements and evaluating their construct validity an ongoing process. In the rapidly changing world, however, not only is the availability of measurement tools changing, but also -and perhaps more importantly- the target constructs. Is reading comprehension still the reading skill we have known and studied for so many years. This question seems to be even more relevant for writing abilities.

In this talk I will review some of the accomplishments of writing research over the past decades and relate these to our conceptualization of the L1 and L2 writing construct. These conceptualizations have repercussions for the way we should measure writing proficiency according to current validity theories. Recent developments in the digitally-mediated world have changed writing, initially superficially as when text processors were introduced, but later on fundamentally, when genAI became available. These developments force us as researchers-teachers to reconsider the construct definitions for writing, and consequentially both our interventions to improve writing proficiency and our operationalizations to measure writing proficiency validly. This latter reconsideration poses additional challenges when we think of writing assessment as a performance assessment in which a writer produces a text that subsequently is rated by human raters and/or automated tools. A few recent (ongoing) writing projects investigate some of the consequences of these developments, i.e., they try to transform language acquisition and communication in a multilingual and digitally-mediated world.

A lo largo de la historia, la medicina ha sido fundamental en la construcción del conocimiento sobre la salud. Sin embargo, en el caso de la salud femenina, su desarrollo ha estado condicionado por marcos conceptuales que no solo han definido su estudio y tratamiento, sino que también han moldeado representaciones sociales y científicas que influyen en su interpretación. Así, a través de la terminología, las expresiones y el uso de metáforas, entre otros recursos lingüísticos, no solo se ha avanzado en la comprensión de este ámbito, sino que también se han consolidado estereotipos y estigmas en torno a procesos como la menstruación, la menopausia y el embarazo. Estas construcciones discursivas no son homogéneas, sino que se adaptan y evolucionan según los contextos socioculturales y lingüísticos en los que se producen. De este modo, en un contexto global y multilingüe, las narrativas biomédicas varían en función del idioma y del marco cultural en el que se inscriben, lo que incide en la manera en que la comunidad médica articula lingüística y discursivamente distintos aspectos de la salud de las mujeres, como la representación de los síntomas, la evolución de los procesos biomédicos y las estrategias terapéuticas.
En este trabajo analizaré cómo el lenguaje biomédico, tanto en español como en inglés, moldea las representaciones de la salud femenina y refuerza —o mitiga— el estigma asociado a ciertos procesos vitales. Para llevar a cabo este examen, me centraré especialmente en las diferencias discursivas entre ambas lenguas y sus implicaciones en la comunicación y la divulgación biomédica. Asimismo, abordaré el impacto del discurso digital, desde la proliferación de información en redes sociales hasta el papel de la inteligencia artificial (IA) y el procesamiento del lenguaje natural (PLN) en la detección y reformulación de términos con carga afectiva. Desde un enfoque interdisciplinar, incorporaré reflexiones sobre cómo la lingüística, la IA y los estudios de género pueden contribuir a una comunicación biomédica más equitativa y humana. Finalmente, exploraré estrategias para reformular narrativas médicas que promuevan un acceso a la información sobre la salud de la mujer libre de sesgos y estigmatización, con especial atención al papel fundamental del lenguaje en la construcción del conocimiento biomédico.