This article analyzes how extensively European Union local governments are using their websites to disseminate financial information in order to evaluate whether electronic-government (e-government) is promoting convergence towards more accountable local governments. We also posit and test various hypotheses about the influence of internal and contextual factors on Internet financial reporting (IFR) practices. Results show that the public administration style, the size of the city, and the audit of financial information by private firms are significant explanatory factors of IFR practices. Our findings also suggest that multilateral organizations are overly optimistic about the possible convergence in transparency and financial accountability through the use of common modes of IFR. That is, the introduction of information and communication technologies without the corresponding institutional reform is leading to limited success of IFR.

This study examines bilingual discourse markers in a language contact situation. The focus is on how English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant New York Puerto Ricans integrate English-language discourse markers into their Spanish-language oral narratives. The corpus comprises 60 Spanish-language oral narratives of personal experience extracted from transcripts of conversations with New York Puerto Ricans. After a review of the study of discourse markers in language contact situations, the use of English-language discourse markers is compared to the use of Spanish-language markers in the texts. The discussion considers the question of whether English-language discourse markers are more profitably identified as instances of code-switching or of borrowing. Finally, the essay explores how bilingual speakers integrate English discourse markers in their narratives with a pattern of usage and frequency that varies according to language proficiency.

This study examines the use of Spanish and English discourse markers among first, second, and third generation Spanish-speakers in Chicago, Illinois, comparing Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican speakers. We find that so is a core borrowing for all groups, although there were some differences in the frequency of usage of the discourse markers across the different Spanish dialect varieties. We also find that of all the variables analyzed, weaker Spanish proficiency is most strongly correlated with more frequent usage of so at the expense of entonces. We predict that these two discourse markers will coexist for some time, but that the frequency of so may increase and the frequency of entonces may decrease for all functions with subsequent generations.