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This research paper aims to shed a critical light on the moral panic surrounding multiple-perpetrator rape (MPR) in Spain, by exploring the interplay between official statistics of this type of crime, and the depiction in the media. The concordance between media representation and the statistical reality of crime raises questions: (1) how multiple perpetrator assault and its assailants are represented in media narratives (content analysis) is examined, including the content, framing, and underlying themes within the media coverage, with a particular emphasis on the role of nationality, and (2) this representation is compared to official crime statistics (Ministry of Home Affairs report on crimes against sexual freedom and indemnity in Spain (detentions/accused) and the statistics of the sentences passed by various Spanish Provincial Courts between 2005 and 2020 from criminal justice data), and to what extent, they align. If they do not align, do news portrayals influence a moral panic? In conclusion, the idea of tabloid justice (Fox et al., 2001) is not present in the three largest Spanish daily newspapers from 2005 to 2021. There is a misrepresentation of non-Spanish nationalities having the highest rates, Romanians being underrepresented and the French being overrepresented. Media coverage perceives tourists as a certain danger, and is questioning the idea of certain non-Spanish immigrants as 'folk devils.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes impoliteness-related language in response to a season's greeting posted by the Prime Ministers of Spain and the UK on December 2022 to wish Twitter users a Felices Fiestas/Merry Christmas. A corpus made up of the first 500 tweet events mentioning Sánchez and Johnson with the @ feature was analyzed through the combination of qualitative and quantitative tools and an impoliteness2 approach to compare the most commonly deployed impoliteness strategies in response to what is felt as an offense by respondents from the two cultures. Previous impoliteness taxonomies inform the analysis (Culpeper, 1996 , 2011). Findings reveal a preference for on-record strategies vs. off-record ones in both corpora. Whereas the English respondents oriented themselves towards attacking the negative face of the Prime Minister and that of other participants with sarcasm and implicated impoliteness, the Spanish group deployed impoliteness-related language to disparage the Prime Minister's positive face through insults and the rectification of his words. The hostile acts and explicit metalanguage about emotional states in the replies to the expressive speech act corroborate the perceived breach of some aspects of the moral order on the part of the Twitter users in the out-group, hence aiding the already observed polarization of political discussions. • Impoliteness is analyzed in replies to the season's greetings of Pedro Sánchez and Boris Johnson on Twitter. • Findings indicate that on-record impoliteness strategies are more frequent than off-record ones in both groups. • English respondents use negative-face attacking strategies, sarcasm, and implicated impoliteness in their replies. • Spanish respondents deploy insults and attacks on the positive public face of the Prime Minister as favored strategies. • Impoliteness-related discourse is multifunctional and aims to restore the moral order that is perceived as altered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present the multiple realizations of lower limit and of speakers from different Spanish speaking territories found in the extensive oral corpus FEC (Fonología del Español Contemporáneo). We present several acoustic criteria to assign the continuum between occlusive and approximant to different phonetic variants to enable quantitative analysis of the corpus. The results of the acoustic analysis confirm the different phases described in previous literature of the phenomenon in the different Spanish speaking territories. Additionally, they show that a) palatal fricative realizations [?] - the IPA symbol commonly used for the phoneme - is very rare in the corpus and b) that in territories that distinguish between/?/and/j/, hybrid variants consisting of lateral + central that show a beginning delateralization are quite recurrent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thie main objective of this paper is the conceptual study and characterization of slow journalism from an academic and professional perspective. As a methodological process, a total of 76 files have been analyzed, of which 58 correspond to publications of authors from the academic world and 18 to journalism professionals. Thie publications come from the academic world on information and journalistic quality, on digital journalism and narrative journalism, as emerging journalistic routines with potential and creative dynamics in the media sector. Thie other part of the analysis corresponds to 18 professional journalism experts. Among the most outstanding results is the preeminence of the academic world when it comes to studying the phenomenon, given that among those who practice journalism there is less production of works in this regard compared to those coming from the university environment. Also in academia there is a greater profusion of denominations to refer to the phenomenon in Spanish, although both in academia and in the journalistic profession itself the most commonly used term is the Anglo-Saxon term slow journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines to what extent and how the teaching of Spanish language and literature was used to convey ideology under the Franco regime. In order to do so, nine textbooks of Adolfo Maíllo have been analyzed, covering the period of 1942-1964. We have compared the author's theoretical approaches with text fragments allowing us to check the degree of compliance with his proposals. In the first place, the importance of the Catholic religion and the glorification of Spain and its political regime must be emphasized, but, to a lesser extent, also the values of working, studying and charity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to quantify the socioeconomic importance of seven phonetic characteristics (seseo, yeismo, /s/-aspiration, /x/-aspiration, /j/-assibilation, /r/-assibilation, and /n/-velarization) whose presence or absence allows distinguishing among twenty-four Spanish dialects. In order to accomplish this goal, we perform a least-square regression analysis to calculate "hedonic prices" for the abovementioned characteristics. The result is that the three more significant characteristics, which seem to operate as signs of a lower per-capita income, are seseo, /x/-aspiration and /r/-assibilation. The first of those characteristics keeps its statistical significance as a sociolinguistic marker when we restrict our analysis to the case of Spain, while /r/-assibilation keeps its statistical significance when we restrict our database to Colombian observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper focuses on how students from China are institutionally constructed through everyday practice in a Madrid middle school, where three years’ fieldwork was conducted as part of a wider research project. Particular attention is paid to the Welcome Programme at this school, a new educational measure intended for students from a migrant background to learn Spanish before they enter mainstream classes. Taking critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a theoretical/methodological/analytical framework, interactional, discursive, and ethnographic data are used to show (a) what social identities are (re)produced and challenged through school practices, in connection with the ideological framework of the modern nation-state; (b) how these practices contribute to legitimizing a particular distribution/valuation of cultural and linguistic resources within the contemporary Spanish educational system; (c) what the institutional consequences are for these Chinese newcomer students. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents an examination of the expression of subject and topic in conversation, using parameters established by Centering Theory. Based on a corpus analysis of English and Spanish casual conversations, we show (i) under what circumstances the subject and the topic of an utterance coincide (‘topic’ is defined, according to Centering, as the backward-looking center of an utterance); and (ii) what referring expressions are used to encode subject and topic. We found that the Cb is realized as subject most of the time (80% of the utterances in English and 73% in Spanish), showing that topichood and subjecthood tend to be assigned to the same entity. The preferred realization for the Cb in those cases is a pronoun in English and a zero pronoun in Spanish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the role of official institutions such as the Academies of the Spanish Language and the Instituto Cervantes in the creation of a Hispanic linguistic community, which is meant to represent a guarantee of cultural unity across the Atlantic after two hundred years of independence. This article highlights the project's faults: the neocolonialist aspects of its linguistic policy, and the submission of particular members of the Spanish American academic and social elites in these metropolitan-inspired initiatives. It also examines the economic logic behind such initiatives in the global market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is based mainly on conversations extracted from a corpus of spoken Spanish gathered in the metropolitan area of Valencia, Spain (Briz and Val.Es.Co Group 2002). Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective (Bravo and Briz 2004), our purpose is to describe the social effects produced by the use of certain strategies related to (im)politeness phenomena in face-to-face interaction with the ongoing negotiation of participants' face (Goffman 1967). We will refer in this paper to Culpeper's concept of authentic impoliteness (1996, 2003, 2005), aimed at describing the damage of a bearer's face. For this author, insults constitute intentionally threatening acts. However, in our study we found that some expressions commonly used for insulting or mocking can, in certain contexts, produce an affiliative social effect, strengthening feelings of solidarity within a group and of closeness between interlocutors. We call this use non-authentic impoliteness. Kienpointner (1997) and Culpeper (op. cit.) identify this impoliteness as mock impoliteness. In turn, Zimmermann (2003) uses the term anti-politeness to refer to similar strategies of impoliteness. We follow Zimmermann's concept but without restricting it to the function of creating male teen identity only. This is because in the Spanish society we observe other groups in which such identity feature is absent. We also take into account Bravo's concepts relative to the crucial role of context to consider participants' expectations and shared knowledge in a given society, such as Bravo's socio-cultural hypothesis (2003: 104; Bravo, in this volume). In our analysis of colloquial interactions, we have registered different linguistic realisations that can be classified as insults in their unmarked form. This unmarkedness is not present in all instances: In certain cases, for example, insults can encourage an interpersonal affiliation between participants. The markedness of insults depends on certain contextual factors (such as interactions between close friends) and an adequate socio-cultural contextualisation and textual co-textualisation. As mentioned above, this markedness would constitute realisations of non-authentic impoliteness. It seems then that there would be a principle of no offence between participants that characterises the communicative exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I measure the contribution of knowing Catalan to finding a job in Catalonia. In the early 1980s, a drastic language policy change ( normalització) promoted the learning and use of Catalan in Catalonia and managed to reverse the falling trend of its relative use vs Castilian (Spanish). Using census data for 1991 and 1996, I estimate a significant positive Catalan premium: the probability of being employed increases between 3 and 5 percentage points if individuals know how to read and speak Catalan; it increases between 2 and 6 percentage points for writing Catalan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]