In recent years, sociolinguistic variation theory has greatly benefited from insights made in cognitive linguistics, a field whose basic tenet is that grammatical structures reflect the human perception of events. Moreover,... [ view full abstract ]
In recent years, sociolinguistic variation theory has greatly benefited from insights made in cognitive linguistics, a field whose basic tenet is that grammatical structures reflect the human perception of events. Moreover, the most modern theoretical approach to morphosyntactic variation is based on the study of the cognitive meanings underlying variants, which is at the core of the empirical concerns of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the variation of second-person object clitic te [‘you’] and third-person object clitic se [lit. ‘it’] from a cognitive viewpoint in advertising discourse. Morphosyntactic variants are choices constructed in a meaningful way that reveal perceptions of real-world events projected stylistically into the domain of discourse and interaction. The variable choice of te or se strongly conditions the cognitive interpretation of advertisements and their meaning. The main cognitive explanatory notion will be salience; the second-person te is more salient than the third-person se; therefore, the meanings conveyed by each one of them in media discourse will be notably different. In general terms, te is used when a special deictic stance is needed, such as indexing a second-person as a potential consumer of the product or idea, whereas se tends to appear in utterances that describe the general and objective benefits of the product or idea advertised. It denotes a non-deictic and depersonalized stance.
The analysis of the interaction between fixed and random factors using the statistical mixed-model Rbrul package (Johnson 2009) serves as a point of departure for corroborating discursive and cognitive analysis. Results indicate that the usage of clitics te vs. se constitutes a different strategy of persuasion in advertising discourse and shows diverse distribution among the sex/gender and age of target consumers. Te variant is more frequently employed in those ads for women and elderly consumers whereas se is used for men and youngsters.
References
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2009. 'Getting off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed effects Variable Rule Analysis'. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3.1: 359–383.
