Coordinador del Grado en Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas de la Universidad de Cádiz
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Sociolingüística, variación, lexicología, semántica, política y planificación lingüísticas, discurso político y periodístico
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Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
Semantic networks in humans and Large Language Models in Spanish: a semantic fluency approach Marta Sánchez-Saus Laserna, Mario Crespo Miguel, Luis Escoriza Morera, Vanesa Álvarez Torres Diacritica, 2026 Semantic fluency tasks, like those traditionally employed in lexical availability research, provide a well-established method for analysing how lexical knowledge is retrieved and organised in humans. This study applies these tasks to Large Language Models (LLMs), comparing their lexical productions with those of human participants in Spanish for the category animals. One hundred university students and five LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, LLaMA) were tested, and their responses were analysed using both quantitative and qualitative data and network-based metrics. Results reveal a clear asymmetry between humans and LLMs. Human participants generated more diverse and heterogeneous lexical sets, producing networks characterised by lower connectivity but higher modularity. LLMs, by contrast, displayed convergent and cohesive outputs, forming denser networks with higher average degrees and clustering but reduced modularity and novelty. Disaggregated analysis showed systematic differences across the LLMs themselves. These findings confirm that LLMs approximate the underlying structure of semantic fluency but do not fully replicate the variability and contextual sensitivity characteristic of human lexical production. The study highlights both the strengths and limitations of artificial systems as models of lexical organization and points to new directions for cross-linguistic comparisons.
Spain: Ceuta and Melilla Gérard Fernández Smith, Luis Escoriza Morera Manual of Romance Languages in Africa, 2023 Ceuta and Melilla are two of the very few communities in which Spanish endures in the African continent. The fact that these cities are a part of the Spanish state entails that Spanish is the only official language in both territories. The use of Spanish reveals dialectal features that are shared by other southern zones of the Iberian Peninsula, where most of the inhabitants of Ceuta and Melilla originally come from. A larger group of the population, who has Spanish as their native language, coexists with different ethnic groups that speak other African languages. Such a situation causes interesting language contact phenomena and has also fostered official pleas for the recognition of those other languages within the public domain, since Spanish is the only subject of language policy in both communities.
Language planning and minority language development Luis Escoriza-Morera Rilce, 2021 La evolución del mapa lingüístico mundial refleja la progresiva disminución de lenguas habladas en el planeta y la desaparición de sistemas lingüísticos en situaciones de contacto. El análisis de las causas de dicha desaparición permite también calificar a un importante número de modalidades como lenguas en peligro de extinción, para las cuales el apoyo oficial resulta indispensable para preservar su existencia. El estudio de diferentes textos legales, de naturaleza general o particular, en el marco de los denominados derechos lingüísticos, nos permitirá descubrir los contextos de uso concretos en los que dichas lenguas pueden ser defendidas institucionalmente y, al mismo tiempo, identificar diferentes actuaciones que oscilan entre la mera preservación, a veces casi exclusivamente documental, de lenguas minoritarias, y el desarrollo de medidas que pretenden realmente garantizar el uso de lenguas en ámbitos públicos como la educación, los medios de comunicación y la administración, de los que habían estado ausentes en periodos anteriores.
Political and journalistic discourse regarding the Catalan declaration of independence A critical analysis Luis Escoriza Morera Discourse Approaches to Politics Society and Culture, 2021 Abstract As van Dijk argues, ideologies are social beliefs which are usually transmitted through discourse, and therefore journalistic and political texts are seen to be two trusted means of communication which are ideal for that function. Within the framework of the relation between language and ideology, my aim is to carry out a critical discourse analysis of various texts of this type. I shall begin by comparing the content of seven different newspapers published on 28 October 2017, the day after the Catalan Parliament’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). Four of these are national in scope (ABC, El País, El Mundo, and La Razón) and three are published in Catalonia (La Vanguardia, El Periódico de Catalunya, and Ara). I then focus my attention on the information expressed in two of these, namely ABC and La Vanguardia, with the aim of examining the different ways the same information is treated and the linguistic mechanisms used to downplay or enhance the same facts for different ideological purposes. In a similar vein, I go on to analyse the different discourse approaches adopted by the main political parties when dealing with the concept of the State in their respective manifestos for the 2019 general election.
The official languages in legal texts in Spain, is this promotion or recognition of multilingualism? Luis Escoriza Morera Revista De Linguistica Y Lenguas Aplicadas, 2019 <p>The use of different languages within the same geographical area usually generates different opinions about how these should be controlled within public ambits, such as education, media or public administration. Our main goal is to provide an analysis of the existing points of view with regard to the use of Spanish and the other co-official languages in Spain, stressing the legal framework that justifies them, as well as their underlying objectives and possible consequences. Our intention is to discuss if these texts are aimed to simply recognize the official character of two languages or if they pursue the development of a linguistic planning that guarantees the use of both within the public ambit.</p>
Lexical semantics and sociolinguistic variation: The semantic description of the lexicon with sociolinguistic features Luis Escoriza Morera Rilce, 2017 There is a long tradition of semantic studies regarding the concept of lexical meaning that reflects the importance of sociocultural factors for its description. Some examples are the study of synonymy, some remarks in dictionaries and the typology of linguistic variation. This paper investigates lexical variants from a sociolinguistic point of view in socially stratified samples. The statistical analysis of the data obtained up to now confirms the relevance of sociolinguistic variables such as the degree of (in) formality, the hearer, the topic of the conversation, the situation where communication takes place, and options offered by the lexicon.
The influence of the degree of formality on lexical variation in Spanish Luis Escoriza Morera Spanish in Context, 2015 Despite the enormous usefulness of variationist studies on a lexical plane, until the present day there has been little research in comparison with the attention paid by sociolinguistics to other levels of linguistic analysis such as phonetic –phonological analysis. This is due, we believe, to the theoretical and methodological problems that may occur at a lexical level. In this paper we present the results of research carried out on fifty lexical variants in Spanish. The results obtained show, on one hand, the possibility and necessity of designing tests which may help us to study the relationship between sociocultural factors and lexical elements and, on the other, the influence of the factor which we have called the degree of formality (based on the existence of different texts and communicative situations on a scale going from the most formal to the most spontaneous) in the choice of lexicon.
Lexical variation. Some difficulties and prospects Linguistica, 2012
Studies on lexical availability: The current situation and some future prospects Linguistic Insights, 2011
