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Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, what we nowadays term Hispanofonía faced a deep crisis when the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War shifted the centre of intellectual life and the print industry definitively from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas. At that time Mexico City and Buenos Aires were renowned for their editorial and intellectual prowess which spread from there to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. This paper focuses on the development of print capitalism to media capitalism in a time when broadcasting exploded as a mainstream form of communication, reaching every home and in so doing becoming a battlefield for ideological language issues. In this context, a number of intellectual figures in Argentina began to question the role of the State in the development of cultural guidelines for the industry—considering whether such input was a risk worth taking in the pursuit of a unified Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the stigmatized use of impersonal se with a plural verb and the prepositional accusative. While this pattern occurs commonly in speech and many forms of writing, it has to all intents been airbrushed from academic consideration of Spanish. On the one hand, the normative authorities dismiss it as an error and on the other it is studiously ignored by professional linguists. Given the pattern's de facto productivity, it is argued in this paper that its exclusion from the standard corpus is essentially arbitrary, the result of a priori assumptions about what should be possible in grammar rather than detached scientific consideration of what actually occurs. More specifically, both prescriptive grammar and theoretical linguistics take it as axiomatic that (in languages like Spanish) number agreement on the finite verb is determined by the subject and never by the object. The pattern discussed here is irreconcilable with that view and, accordingly, has come to be treated as a non-legitimate datum. The case thus provides a good illustration of how the concept of grammaticality, supposedly the empirical foundation of modern syntax, may be no less arbitrary than the older normative principle of correct usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]