Familiarity as a « Kitsch » Generating Mechanism in Private and Media Discourse

The paper investigates the implications of the colloquial language in the production and reception of the kitsch as a language phenomenon, with a special focus on its processability within the language field in which it manifests itself. Two types of communication contexts are subject to our analysis: the telephone/internet communication (where the target is to set a typology of the occasional kitsch as found in students’ private messages) and excerpts from journalistic text, namely the entertainment category (where we examine the oratorical kitsch facets present in the article titles of the journalistic text). We have thus highlighted that the re-evaluation of established forms transforms various pre-existing models, through the appeal to familiarity, into brands of mediocrity and vulgarity.