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As reading and writing are both language processes, one can assume relationships between them, but the exact nature of these relationships has not yet been determined. While a large body of research has addressed reading comprehension and written production independently, very little investigation has examined the possible relationships between these two psycholinguistic processes, particularly from a discourse and cognitive perspective. Argumentative texts were analyzed in the present investigation on reading-writing connections. Four tests were designed and tested on 439 eighth graders. The tests assessed psycholinguistic variables that account for the microstructural, macrostructural and superstructural levels of comprehension/production processing. Correlation results showed significant coefficients between reading and writing of argumentative texts in all the psycholinguistic levels analyzed. These results suggest that the processes involved in both activities share some common knowledge-based strategies.

This article identifies and describes the rhetorical organization of the Textbook genre, based on a corpus-based approach and on part of PUCV-2006 Corpus of Academic Spanish. This subcorpus includes 126 textbooks collected from four scientific disciplines at undergraduate university programmes: Social Work, Psychology, Construction Engineering and Industrial Chemistry. In order to fulfil the goals, the article determines and describes the communicative purposes of each of the moves and steps identified, and gives examples from the four disciplinary domains. A new macro-level to fully account for the analysis is introduced and justified, which turned out to be essential for a better description of an extensive textual unit as these texts are (200,000 words). This is named as macro-move. The main findings reveal a well-organized organization directed towards educational instruction. The genre fundamental nucleus is formed by the macro-move Conceptualization and Exercising, which is repeated as many times as the contents are displayed. By the end of the article, the question appearing in the title is answered and arguments are offered to explain why the genre's rhetorical organization is described as a 'colony-in-loops'.

Resumen: En este artículo se exponen las bases teóricas de una concepción integral de la comprensión de textos escritos, denominada Teoría de la Comunicabilidad. Esta concepción teórica no constituye una propuesta totalmente nueva, sino que se avanza desde antecedentes teóricos y empíricos previos y se busca delimitarla de modo más definido, profundizar en ciertos aspectos y denominarla por primera vez de modo único. Dicha teoría se resume por medio de un principio fundante ('la acreditabilidad de lo comprendido') y tres supuestos centrales (el 'supuesto de la cognición situada', el 'supuesto de la interactividad' y el 'supuesto de la socioconstructividad'), los cuales a su vez se elaboran en diez supuestos más específicos.Palabras Clave: Teoría de la Comunicabilidad, comprensión de textos escritos.

Not many studies have focused on the analysis of the rhetorical organization of a genre and the respective frequency of occurrence of moves and steps as they occur in a corpus across disciplines – particularly, with a complementary qualitative-quantitative approach. This article aims to become a step in helping to fill this gap in research on Spanish. In this way, the textbook genre, the occurrence of its rhetorical macro-moves, moves and steps and disciplinarity are the central focus of this study. More specifically, in this article we seek to determine and to compare the frequency of occurrence of macro-moves, moves and steps in a corpus of 126 university textbooks across the academic discourse of four disciplines. We distinguish the major areas of knowledge (Basic Sciences and Engineering and Social Sciences and Humanities) as well as the specific disciplines (Social Work, Psychology, Industrial Chemistry and Construction Engineering). The main findings show there are differences between the occurrence of some discourse moves and steps across the texts of disciplines under study, which reveals a distinctive feature in the didactic component of textbooks. So we can infer that knowledge construction process through this genre is not carried out in the same way and that disciplinarity plays an important role in the diversifying organizational discourse patterns detected.

This article studies the economic effects of disabled members on Italian households, with the aim of identifying a suitable target group for welfare policies. Survey of Households Income and Wealth data for the year 2000 is used. Preliminary results show significant differences in levels of income and poverty diffusion to the detriment of households with disabled members. We propose an exogenous explanation: the replacement ratio between disability benefits and expected labour income shows that disability benefits do not compensate the potential incomes of the disabled person and of the possible carer, except in households with severe socioeconomic disadvantages. We also propose an endogenous explanation: applying a logit model we show that the labour market participation of the possible carer is reduced in households with disabled persons. In order to increase the income of the households with disabled members, policy recommendations include the provision of care services and structural policies to improve employment, income and educational opportunities for households at greatest disadvantage.

RESUMENEste artículo aborda críticamente un modo relativamente reciente de hacer lingüística, esto es, la denominada Lingüística de Corpus (LC). Para ello se presenta una breve panorámica de su (re)surgimiento y se revisa un encuadre teórico que justifica su independencia como una metodología de investigación en lingüística pero con poderosos principios reguladores. También propongo mi propia definición de LC. Se discute el posible estatus de la LC como una teoría. Hacia el final del artículo se pone en relación a la LC y algunas investigaciones en lengua española.Palabras claves: Lingüística de Corpus, metodología, texto, corpus. ABSTRACTThis article focuses critically on a relatively new way of doing linguistics, that is, Corpus Linguistics (CL). To do so, a general overview of the (re)emergence is presented and a theoretical background is analyzed in order to justify its independence as a linguistic research methodology but with robust principles. Also, my own definition of CL is proposed. A discussion of the possible status of CL as a theory is focused. To the end of the article, CL and Spanish language research is related.Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, methodology, text, corpus. : 15-11-2007: 15-11- . Aceptado: 17-03-2008 * Este artículo se ha elaborado en el marco del Proyecto Fondecyt Nº 1060440. 1 Todas las traducciones son responsabilidad del autor, con el fin de poner a disposición de un público más amplio trabajos exclusivamente en lengua inglesa. Recibido

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