Análisis lingüístico contrastivo del mercado editorial internacionalel género de las revistas de novias en EE. UU. y España

Abstract

The Wedding Market is a powerful and blooming economic sector throughout the world. The Wedding Industry feeds on the idealized message born in the US culture, which stipulates that a wedding is “the most important day for any woman” and constitutes “a crucial step in her new life”. Even though “tying the knot" has always been determined by the different cultures, due to the phenomenon of globalization, marriage stereotyping of the US culture is increasingly imposing itself on European traditions. The present research aims to understand how is it that, among other media that daily bombard consumers, bridal magazines function as a “voice” of this voracious market, persuading its audience worldwide to believe in the romanticized fairy-tale idea of a wedding. We argue that the dissemination of the American wedding culture is being echoed in Spanish bridal magazines. To pursue to what extent this emulation happens, this PhD thesis seeks to examine the main communicative purpose of bridal magazines as genres, and specifically how such purpose is articulated in English and Spanish. It is our main objective to reveal the linguistic and rhetorical phenomena that occur in the genre in distinct gradations, and to draw some conclusions regarding the kind of interpersonality established in the different texts. With such goal in mind, a contrastive linguistic analysis scrutinizing the genre of wedding magazines at three different levels (text, discourse and metadiscourse) was conducted. By means of a qualitative approach, where use has been made of quantification limited by a non-digitally processable corpus, the following phenomena have been examined: at the first level, neology and emotion lexicon have been studied, the rhetorical macrostructure has been analyzed at the second level, and, finally, metadiscourse devices have been approached. According to the results of the first level, both neology and lexicon with an emotional hue are two prototypical phenomena of the peculiar wedding discourse, which contribute to the poetization and divinization of marriage. On the one hand, neology has proven to be a creative resource more frequently used in English, which stands for a greater lexical flexibility and creativity of the English language compared to Spanish. On the other hand, our study reveals an evident appeal to emotions in both sub-corpus and, mainly, to positive ones. At the second level, a conscious hierarchical organization of content has been observed in both magazines, as well as the use of certain macrostructural stereotypes, which secretly pursue to influence readers’ consumer decisions. Finally, the third level has allowed us to verify that metadiscourse constitutes a persuasive tool, used to establish a close interpersonal relationship, emulating a conversation “between friends”, for the unwary reader to accept the message without suspicion. The findings indicate that writers in both cultures mainly rely upon interpersonal metadiscourse markers to encode such relation, but more evidently so in the English corpus. Concludingly, and as we forecast at the beginning of the study, we believe that the divergences found in some textual, discursive and pragmatic traits, could be attributed to the deeper traditional roots of American magazines in the Wedding Market. As a consequence, mirroring US practices, Spanish bridal magazines employ an array of persuasive strategies to catch the potential reader’s attention and, ultimately, guide their consumption habits.