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The goal of this paper is to study the syntactic function and the pragmatic relevance in the use of the verb ser in Colombian Spanish as in Salí fue a correr; Les gusta estar es en la calle. We will use the data from El español hablado en Bogotá. Relatos semilibres de informantes pertenecientes a tres estratos sociales, by José Joaquín Montes Giraldo (1997), and a corpus created with the texts of Casa de Nariño, published by the Presidencia de la República de Colombia. Following Mercedes Sedano's precedent works for the phenomenon in Caracas, we will insist in the idea that these constructions are focal structures and they serve to communicate emphasis. We will resume the precedent research about the phenomenon, we will present our new data for the Spanish in Colombia, and we will study the emphatic mechanisms linked to the pragmatic motivation to create these syntactic constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]