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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]

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]