THE PHENOMENON OF TELETÓN IN CHILE: A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
Author
Ivanova,Anna
Mardones,Tricia
Abstract
Slogans, being primarily part of brand-management, present an outstanding interest for linguistic research as a vivid demonstration of how language can influence people's minds and behavior. Te dramatic popularity of Teletón has attracted our attention as linguists to underpin its success by studying its textual level, i.e., the role of language in creating successful brand. For the attainment of this goal, the paper departs from a corpus analysis of Teletón slogans collected from 1978 to 2012. By studying the selected corpus, this paper intends to single out and categorize the most popular concepts raised by Teletón in its fund-raising campaigns. For a more comprehensive display and analysis, and thus discussing the way semantic prosody is realized (Sinclair, 1991; Louw, 1993; Hunston, 1997; Stubbs, 2002), this study resorted to a WordSmith© Tool, after having turned the collected slogans into the digital format (saved as a .txt file). Te obtained results evidence four main groups of linguistic strategies employed by Teletón in its campaigns: 1) inclusive language; 2) positive semantic prosody; 3) proximity to the public; 4) national lexis.