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This paper examines the appropriation by the media of intimacy which is typical of contemporary television, as evidenced in the increasing immediacy of contents and in the resulting increasing colloquial character of public discourse. In turn, these trends reflect the economic, social and cultural processes underlying the democratization of fame, and their impact on both diastratic and diaphasic intra-linguistic variation, as well as in the extensive and intensive immediatization of idiomatic and discursive traditions. The paper proposes to differentiate between feigned orality, on the one hand, and strategic or reality-simulating orality, on the other, the second one, functionally very different from the former, being closer to Homeric orality; it encompasses the "reality TV" format, where colloquialization is the result of extensive immediatization, as well as other formats based on intensive scripted immediatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the book "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language," by Robin Dunbar. Dunbar, who has studied primates in the wild and written a raft of papers on human conversational behavior, believes that language evolved so we could gossip. The important thing about language, in his view, is not the information it enables us to convey but that it allows us to, well,. make friends. In his view, Dunbar says that language didn't take off from ape vocalizations but from another behavior entirely.

In this paper the main objective is to continue the study of the most important means of grammatical assimilation of anglicisms in present-day Spanish, starting from a colloquial language corpus-based data. Therefore, in this second paper we shall examine the devices of plural formation of anglicisms belonging to noun class, by focusing on the disagreement between norm and usage in current Spanish. We will also analyze both the poor grammatical assimilation of English adjectives (quantitatively scarce but a good sign of the strong influence of Angloamerican mentality in modern Spanish society) together with the adjectivation of nouns, and the assimilation of verbs by means of verbal endings of the first conjugation in Spanish. Finally, we will draw up a balance of the distribution of anglicisms in word classes, a topic with regard to which it is worth mentioning the relatively high percentage of adjectives and interjections in spite of dealing with a cultural borrowing situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how news outlets report issues regarding obscenities or crass language. In July 2008, the Reverend Jesse Jackson made such a comment with regards to Senator Barack Obama. His comment generally considered to be a crude colloquialism . Several prominent papers such as the "Los Angeles Times" and the "Chicago Tribune" published his comments unedited. However, others, such as the "Washington Post" and the "The New York Times" did not. Some argue that these papers did their readers a disservice because they could not discern for themselves the meaning or importance of Jackson's words. INSETS: A Stand for Civility;Avoiding Gutter Language;The AP's Take.

This paper will provide a detailed geographic analysis of the reach of yeísmo in Spain's monolingual Spanish-speaking autonomous communities, using information provided by the Atlas Lingüísticos published up to 2013, in order to present an overview of the extent and development of this phonetic phenomenon in the Spanish spoken in Spain. It thus aims to build on recent studies (Gómez & Molina, 2013) that have attempted to assess the distribution of this feature throughout the Spanish-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grammatical treatises tell us that adverb + possessive structures are used in the spoken language, in a colloquial register, preferably in some areas of American Spanish. The aim of this paper is to describe the peculiarities of such constructions in news from the digital media. Specifically, we make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of adverbs of location in our materials that support this type of adjacent; we study the profitability of different possessives in this syntactic environment, based on the grammatical person; we seek an explanation for male-female variation in the possessive; we observe how it affects the fact that these constructions are term of preposition; and at last we provide data about their diatopical distribution in the Hispanic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some problems related to the analysis of the starting segments of linguistic utterances which show theoretical and descriptive difficulties concerning the limits between the notions of focus and topic. It plaids for extending the analysis of frontings and left-dislocations beyond the field of information structure, due to the fact that at least in colloquial varieties of language it is also important to pay attention to discourse functions related to interactive organization, the spontaneous construction of discourse and contextual embedding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose to examine the behavior of full and partial echoic repetition in Spanish and Italian, with the aim of analyzing the similarities and differences considering the following parameters: the forms, the morphosyntactic metamorphoses suffered compared with the preceding sentence, the structures or schemas where they are inserted, the pragmatic and textual features they fulfill and the frequency of use in both languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Spanish discursive markers classifications there is not usual to take into account the notions of agreement and disagreement, though it is clear that they are part of the content they are able to transmit. This paper is a pragmalinguistic approximation to the functions of agreement and disagreement in the frame of the colloquial Spanish conversation across the study of the discourse markers bueno, bien, vale and de acuerdo. We try to raise: a. The differences between the meaning of the signs with which we deal and others with similar meaning (desde luego, claro…); b. The similarities and differences of bueno, bien, vale and de acuerdo when expressing the agreement and disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the whole range of devices to express Verum Focus (or polarity focus) in Spanish is analysed. After having introduced the basic concepts needed for the analysis (Verum Focus, its syntactic manifestations and its semantic interpretation), the various constructions expressing Verum Focus, the conditions governing the way they fit into the context and their contribution to the interpretation of the discourse in which they occur are considered in detail. The asymmetries that arise are explained as the result of some structural differences. A principled account of the notion of "emphasis" is offered in terms of Verum Focus. The proposal is illustrated with examples from various corpora of contemporary Spanish. From a more general point of view, it is shown that current theoretical models can successfully account for the distribution and nuances of colloquial discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the use of the expression hasta las trancas --originally hasta las trencas-- which is widely used in modern colloquial Spanish in Europe and to a lesser extent in Mexico, but not included in the DRAE nor in most other dictionaries. A corpus of examples has been collected based on questionnaires and sampling in the provinces of Almería, Granada and Málaga, in Internet discussion forums, the daily press and periodicals and literary texts. In the study the different meanings of this expression are listed, and the different uses of each semantic value are tabled (e.g. predicative and attributive verb combinations, and noun and adjective modifications). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the history of American currency in terms of the language and slang used to describe it and the physical color of the money whether in coin or paper. History of the term 'greenback'; Discussion of an 'Associated Press' report informing that the U.S. will issue new 20-dollar bills with more color than just green; Origins of the term 'moolah' for money; Origin and definition of the term 'deflation'; How the term 'yard' is applied monetarily and in foreign exchange rates according to Paul Maidment of 'Forbes.'

Reports on a study conducted by David Buss, Plymouth University's head for the Exeter School of Arts and Design, on the everyday use of color names in popular phrases. Colors used in phrases; Highlights of the paper `The Use of Colour Names in Idiomatic and Colloquial Language,' presented to an international conference in Sweden; Discoveries made in the study.

The article discusses the etymology of the term "boondoggle." The original meaning of the word was a braided leather lanyard, like the one given to Sir Robert Baden-Powell at the 1929 World Scouting Jamboree. Robert Marshall mentioned the term while testifying at an investigation of New York City's Emergency Relief Bureau and the paper's decided it was a Native American word.