This review describes the present state of knowledge about phytic acid (phytate), which is often present in legume seeds. The antinutritional effects of phytic acid primarily relate to the strong chelating associated with its six reactive phosphate groups. Its ability to complex with proteins and particularly with minerals has been a subject of investigation from chemical and nutritional viewpoints. The hydrolysis of phytate into inositol and phosphates or phosphoric acid occurs as a result of phytase or nonenzymatic cleavage. Enzymes capable of hydrolysing phytates are widely distributed in micro-organisms, plants and animals. Phytases act in a stepwise manner to catalyse the hydrolysis of phytic acid. To reduce or eliminate the chelating ability of phytate, dephosphorylation of hexa- and penta-phosphate forms is essential since a high degree of phosphorylation is necessary to bind minerals. There are several methods of decreasing the inhibitory effect of phytic acid on mineral absorption (cooking, germination, fermentation, soaking, autolysis). Nevertheless, inositol hexaphosphate is receiving increased attention owing to its role in cancer prevention and/or therapy and its hypocholesterolaemic effect.

The aim of this paper is to see what Critical Discourse Analysis is. This implies scrutinising its origins, what it has meant to the academic world as a whole, how it encapsulates various trends with different theoretical backgrounds and methodological approaches, what are its limitations and its new developments. A simple practical example will show its potential.

The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies that politicians can use in order to defeat their political adversaries. To this end, I have put some ideas developed by discourse analysts to the test, taping some of the speeches, interviews and debates of the 2000 electoral campaign in Andalusia (Spain), scrutinizing the four main candidates’ most significant discursive devices and paying special attention to the way they interact with each other, their interviewers and the audience in their political meetings. In this way, I have tried to see whether their different political persuasions may produce a characteristically different distinctive linguistic style, whether gender might influence their choice of discourse structures, and the extent to which the winning candidate’s linguistic idiosyncrasies might have contributed to his success.

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Linguistic modality is the expression of the speaker’s subjectivity including possibility, probability, necessity, obligation, permission, prohibition, and desire. This paper analyses a learner English corpus collected at two Spanish universities, paying special attention to which linguistic devices (e.g., modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs or nouns) English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students make use of when providing for and against arguments in their assignments. Applying a corpus-based methodology not only enabled comparisons to be made with other native and non-native data but also facilitated both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The findings show remarkable similarities and differences, and leave several issues at stake: the relationship between the degree of assertiveness of a text and (1) the student’s gender, (2) their command of the Foreign Language (FL), and (3) their familiarity with the genre they are expected to write in.