La cultura en la palabra

* La palabra es el mágico don que distingue al ser humano del resto de animales: no tener una palabra, un «nombre», es casi como no existir, o existir de una manera indefinida, incompleta. * Una operación tan delicada como la elección de un nombre para un bebé que está a punto de nacer se convierte, a veces, en motivo de discusión o está sometida a «exigencias» familiares, que imponen nombres anticuados destinados a ser odiados por sus destinatarios o que acaban deformados en extraños diminutivos. * Dar un nombre, sin embargo, es y debe ser un acto creativo, porque el propio...

Did you know that, according to director Chris Columbus, Robin Williams improvised so much during the filming of Mrs. Doubtfire that the studio had enough footage to release PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 versions of the movie? Or that Robin ad-libbed all his lines in Good Morning, Vietnam because the DJ the movie was based on didn’t really do comedy during his shows? Robin Williams, American Master looks at Robin’s seventy movies, from his earliest appearance in Can I Do It…’Til I Need Glasses? to his final posthumous voice-only appearance in Absolutely Anything. Each film is discussed...

The proceedings assemble some 240 papers covering eight sections: 1. phonetics and phonology, 2. morphology, 3. syntax, 4. lexical semantics, 5. editing and textual criticism, 6, rhetoric, poetics and literary theory, 7. applied linguistics, 8. history of linguistics. In addition, they include four plenary lectures and two round table discussions. The papers provide a panorama view of old and new concerns in Romance studies illustrated from various theoretical perspectives and providing an example of what this sector has to contribute to the development of linguistics and literary studies in...

Accompanying DVD is a repeating loop of a one minute, forty second stop-action animation, with music.