Spanish in Context - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2014

La incorporación de blogs en la prensa electrónica ha estimulado la participación de los lectores como comentaristas de los contenidos periodísticos. Esta práctica produce una unidad textual compuesta por un texto escrito offline, el artículo periodístico, y, adosada a él, una cadena de comentarios escritos online. Este género discursivo compuesto permite estudiar, tanto la evolución de la relación de los medios con sus audiencias, como las propiedades de los textos producidos en los ambientes virtuales y públicos. Esta investigación compara el uso de recursos metadiscursivos interactivos e interaccionales entre las columnas de opinión y los comentarios que reciben, en dos diarios electrónicos chilenos. Los resultados muestran que hay diferencias sistemáticas en el uso de estos recursos metadiscursivos entre los artículos iniciales y los comentarios, así como también, entre los medios estudiados. De estos resultados se desprende que el metadiscurso permite diferenciar los géneros que componen esta práctica (artículos y comentarios), y los medios estudiados (El Mercurio y The Clinic).

The aim of the present paper is to investigate some of the strategies used by English and Spanish teenagers to intensify language. For this purpose, we have analysed data from three corpora of teenagers language. Our analysis shows the frequent use of really and so as intensifiers in English, yet a low frequency in Spanish of adverbs ending in -mente. Taboo words, such as bloody and fucking in English, and puto and jodido in Spanish, are quite commonly attested as intensifiers, although the former seem to be more grammaticalised and are much more multifunctional than their Spanish counterparts. Expletives are also a frequent resource to intensify language but while in English they bear religious connotations, in Spanish they are associated with sexuality. Finally, some other devices were considered: prefixes in English (super-, mega-, uber-), suffixes in Spanish (-ón, -azo, -orro), and a series of expressions (e.g. cool in English and a tope in Spanish). From all this, we conclude that there exist common tendencies regarding intensifying strategies used by teenagers although important differences have also been attested in each individual language

Mock Spanish is a register in which Spanish words or phrases are used in otherwise English language texts or utterances to evoke humor, often indexing an unflattering image of Spanish speakers. This paper examines the occurrence of Mock Spanish in mass media, of interest in part because its use there cannot be mitigated so much as is possible in private speech by factors such as the speaker’s or writer’s intentions or relationships with addressees. Participants in previous studies have cited these factors as potential attenuators of Mock Spanish’s offensiveness. Mass media is also of interest for its role in the reproduction of elite discourses. This paper’s objective is to further engage the question of Mock Spanish as a form of racist discourse, and to examine the implications for those who are users of Spanish as a second language or are in the business of training second language users of Spanish.

This study analyzes the patterns of incorporation of English elements in New Mexican Spanish in the decades following the annexation of New Mexico by the United States as reflected in a corpus of private letters written between 1848 and 1936. The quantitative analysis shows that most types of contact features are infrequent during much of this period, but there is an increase in the presence of English elements in the last decades covered by the corpus. It also shows that semantic and lexical borrowing is much more frequent than structural interference or code-switching. These findings are then correlated with the general sociolinguistic environment of post-annexation Hispanic New Mexico, where bilingualism and language shift to English were much more infrequent than elsewhere in the US Southwest. Attention is also paid to features that pertain exclusively to the written language, and their distribution is explained as a function of the degree of exposure of Hispanic New Mexicans to literacy in English and Spanish.

Attested in a wide variety of contact situations, bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) have baffled linguists, as they are innovative hybrid constructions that appear superfluous. In the current study, we examine BCVs in Northern Belize, where Spanish/English language alternation occurs alongside the pervasive use of Belizean Kriol, Belize’s lingua franca. We analyze Northern Belize code-switchers’ acceptability judgments and use of BCVs in oral production to determine whether stativity and/or verb frequency constrain the incorporation of BCVs as previously contended. The quantitative analysis of acceptability judgments and 553 canonical BCVs from 25 adolescent and 18 post-adolescent speakers revealed that BCVs are not constrained by stativity or verb frequency. We contend that although there are syntactic constraints, bilinguals’/multilinguals’ use of their linguistic resources is largely dependent on social factors (Sebba 1998). In the case of Northern Belize, where speakers do not perceive code-switching as illegitimate but rather embrace it and associate it with their mixed, multiplex identity, positive attitudes to non-standard varieties may have paved the way for the ubiquitous use of BCVs. The availability of a native Spanish/Mayan BCV model may have also catalyzed the process. BCVs in Northern Belize merit further investigation as they are innovative structures with Creoloid features that reflect code-switchers’ creative ability to capitalize on structural parsimony.