Advertising, Language Registers, Theater in Spain: Key Concepts
Advertising: A Type of Communication
Advertising is a type of communication in which the issuer tries to make themselves known to the public to influence and persuade. Added: One’s own advertising text combines verbal text, sound, and image.
Characteristics
- Images: Familiar elements for the receptors (celebrities or prestige) and originality of composition. Color captures attention and suggests feelings.
- Slogan: Short, concise text with important information that enhances the expressive linguistic areas of the product. Resources include typographical resources to highlight the item.
- Logos: A graphic sign that functions as an emblem of the organization and facilitates identification. It has words, abbreviations, or just a drawing.
Registers: Expressive Modes
Registers are expressive modes of a speaker in a concrete communicative situation (family, pediatric, professional, loving, commercial).
Family Register
- Diminutive (e.g., Juanma)
- Semantic field of kinship (e.g., potato)
- Pet name/derogatory (e.g., love/goofy)
- Diminutives/augmentative (e.g., smallish)
Youth Register
- Phonetic changes (e.g., too)
- Invention of words (e.g., fresh)
- Changes in meaning (e.g., hesitate)
- Fillers (e.g., I tell ya!)
- Hypocoristics (e.g., Manu)
- Shortening (e.g., institution)
- Specific suffixes (e.g., druggie)
Slang: Specialized Language
Slang is a special language used by each member of a group, profession, or occupation.
Types
- Scientific: Areas of specialized technical know-how (e.g., agoraphobia, catatonia)
- Craft: Fixed vocabulary, very common (e.g., chisel, file)
- Technical Industrial: Words of foreign origin (e.g., gum, bit)
Jargon: Language of Marginalized Groups
Jargon is the language of marginalized groups. (Coded language, avoid being understood, group unity).
Types
- Talegario: Jail
- Cheli: Countercultural currents (e.g., gagging, painful)
- Lunfardo: Lower social groups in Buenos Aires
Loanwords: Words from Other Languages
Loanwords are words that are incorporated into a language from another language.
Types
- Foreignism: Holds its shape (e.g., pizza)
- Adaptation: Adopts pronunciation and spelling of the language that incorporates it (e.g., soccer)
- Decal: An existing word takes the meaning of the term provided (e.g., extensive – a new term meaning “from existing word” – compound complex)
Spanish Theater Until 1975
Spanish drama and humor evolved from postwar evasion through social realist drama and until formal renewal.
Stages
- Humor: In the 1940s, coupled with theater evasion, humor developed in theater (e.g., Miguel Mihura, Three Top Hats)
- Realism: In the 1950s, theater reflected and criticized reality (e.g., Alfonso Sastre, Squadron Towards Death)
- Formal Renewal: In the 1960s, symbolic and allegorical theater with avant-garde influence emerged to show totality. Independent theater groups were created (e.g., Francisco Nieva, Hair Storm)
Antonio Buero Vallejo
- First Works: Existential anguish, dashed freedom, single stage, social issues (e.g., History of a Staircase)
- Later Works: Social, historical characters and environments, multiple scenarios, temporary ellipsis, immersion effect, restoration of theatrical techniques (e.g., The Dreamer for a People)
Current Theater Trends
In the late 1970s, there was a revitalization of playwrights, theater groups, and stable companies.
Trends
- Experimental Groups: Groups of collective creation survive (e.g., Els Joglars) or new ones emerge (e.g., Dagoll Dagom)
- Realism: Current situations, humor, and irony. Realistic aesthetics, moderate formal innovations (e.g., José Sanchis Sinisterra, Ay, Carmela!; Fernando Fernán Gómez, Bicycles Are for the Summer)