Author:

Keywords:

2004 Linguistics, 4704 Linguistics

Abstract:

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the social meaning of style-shifts between standard and neo-standard Italian in a corpus of 200 recent TV commercials. As marketeers make good use of stylistic choices to address their target audience with positive values, such as spontaneity and authenticity, advertising offers highly suitable data to find out which social and stylistic meaning linguistic features express. In this paper, every commercial was divided in different scenes or «spot elements», and the influence of different socio-variational factors on the choice between standard and neo-standard features was calculated using a multivariate method, viz. the conditional inference tree. The results confirm the hypotheses that morphosyntactic variants coming from colloquial varieties and regional features are used to imitate interactions from daily life, for celebrity endorsements and by products that flaunt their locally based, genuine identity. The extensive use of these variants in particular contexts suggests that neo-standard features are used to express informal, authentic real-life situations. Nevertheless, in the more descriptive spot elements and in commercials targeted to a children’s audience the standard language is preferred, which suggests that standard Italian has still maintained its traditional prestige. These findings confirm that both varieties are considered appropriate for each of their own different stylistic purposes.