The given name by which we call ourselves in our native language contains a series of phonetic, social, and cultural elements that determine its value in any given context. When people migrate, these elements change and, consequently, so does the individual’s self-perception. This research consists of an analysis of focused interviews with Peruvian and Chinese migrants carried out in Spanish and Italian. The most common phenomenon identified in the interviews was the use of names that do not correspond to birth names, either because they are not pronounced correctly or because—as in the case of most of the Chinese informants—the name was changed to adapt to Western standards. We attempt to categorize the nonconformity of the version of the name used by the host population and the emotional reactions that this provokes. The results demonstrate that there is a correlation between the desire to integrate into the host country and positive reactions to the image given to them by the foreign name.

In Spain and Arab countries, the way of celebrating feasts and occasions is gathering with family and enjoying a meal together. In this communicative situation, compliments on the delicious food prepared will take place. The purpose of the study is analyzing compliment/compliment responses used by advanced Arab learners of Spanish (C1) with an advanced knowledge of English and French (C1 level). In order to compare this speech act with the native production, the researchers considered three groups of participants: native speakers of Spanish, native speakers of Arabic and Lebanese learners of Spanish. The research variable is "origin". "Gender" and "age" variables are not included in this study. A muted video is the instrument to collect the data. Compliment/compliment responses in Arabic and Spanish are analyzed following a taxonomy created by the researchers. In Spanish, explanations were used, whereas in Arabic the use of formulaic courtesy expressions was frequent. In the production of Lebanese learners of Spanish, pragmatic transfer of Arabic formulaic expressions and the influence of foreign languages (French and English) occur.

Linguistic complexity measures are used to describe second language (L2) performance and assess levels of proficiency and development. Although morphology is considered crucial in L2 acquisition, morphological complexity has been relatively neglected, hindering comprehensive views of grammatical complexity in L2. This article presents an application of a recently proposed metric of morphological diversity, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI), in an L2 Spanish corpus of 113 essays classified into four proficiency levels by expert evaluators. The aim of the study is to investigate the relationships of MCI with subjectively rated proficiency and with other four quantitative measures of L2 complexity. Results indicate that morphological complexity, as measured by MCI, does not vary significantly across proficiency levels in this corpus. The MCI shows significant correlations with lexical but not with syntactic complexity measures. Findings are interpreted in the light of the characteristics of the corpus and the acquisition of the Spanish verbal system.

This research aims to investigate the presence in textbooks of varied material in terms of geolectal equivalents and its perception by teachers of Spanish as a foreign language. In order to examine potential differences in their approach, a pedagogical framework-based task was designed to study a corpus of 100 ELE teachers’ evaluations (50 from Colombia and 50 from Spain) and examine their consciousness and dissimilarities regarding pragmatic correctness when expressing addresses and greeting headings in electronic messages. The results show that native teachers tend to consider as correct the stimuli of peninsular Spanish or of their own variety, while those representing different geolectal variations of Spanish tend to score very low, even being considered as inter or intralinguistic error.