Advertising discursive practice and conceptual profile in advertisements from hispanic-american publications: 18th and 19th centuries

Abstract

CORDIAM provides access to a series of texts catalogued as «advertising documents and miscellaneous advertisements», which allows the researcher, within the theoretical and methodological framework of discursive traditions, to trace the specialised uses that characterise these infopersuasive contexts. This study, departing from a variationist perspective and from the corpus of printed advertisements provided by CORDIAM for the 18th and 19th centuries, examines the linguistic options that configure the macrostructure of these speech practices according to cost-benefit relations, interpersonal relationships, and sociolinguistic and emotional factors, which will shape different typologies of advertisements according to the conceptual profile (distance vs. communicative proximity) and the pragmatic suitability to the communicative objectives. These factors will determine different syntactic solutions for the different sequences, both descriptive and instructional. The results obtained allow us to establish a contrast with linguistic constructions found for the same typology in Spanish newspapers in which the macrostructure of the printed advertisement determined the presence of grammatical mechanisms, such as the future subjunctive and the adjectival gerund, structures considered infrequent in the period analysed.