'Big Brother' Germany and Spain: a Linguistic Characterization from a Theory of Register

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to justify the suitability of using Big Brother as a means of addressing the study of colloquial register in German and Spanish. Drawing on the conceptualization of register as a continuum (Briz Gómez 2010), in the following pages we examine an unpublished bilingual corpus consisting of conversations in daily routine contexts. The analysis of the data reveals that the situational features are highly colloquial in the interactions studied, and shows a specific display of the following parameters: control on language production, lexical in/accuracy, deixis, un/familiar treatment, syntax, extra/linguistic contextualization and tone. In conclusion, this qualitative study sheds light on the language used in conversations in reality television and lays the foundation to consider Big Brother an adequate corpus for analyzing colloquial register in both languages.