Do consumers distinguish between verb forms in written advertising? Verbal voseo and tuteo in Montevideo, Uruguay
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Joseph R. Weyers
Abstract
This article reports on 279 surveys that were conducted to determine how Montevidean consumers perceive the forms of address inherent in written advertising. Survey participants were shown five pictures of commercial ads and asked to identify if the ad addressed them as tú or vos. The ads contained only null subject verb forms. The results show that while a majority of consumers identified tú as the form of address inherent in verbal tuteo forms that use a written accent mark, other verbal tuteo forms that do not use a diacritic were less readily identifiable. At the same time, younger speakers showed a propensity for seeing vos in advertising more regularly than older speakers. Finally, the results suggest that since Montevidean consumers are accustomed to seeing vos in written advertising, in many cases they identify that form of address regardless of the advertiser's intention.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- The Portuguese language in the United Nations – framing policy design
- List of SLSLC articles
- Do consumers distinguish between verb forms in written advertising? Verbal voseo and tuteo in Montevideo, Uruguay
- Influence of generational cohort and experience with non-native speakers on evaluation of speakers with foreign-accented speech
- Interacting with domestic workers in Kuwait: grammatical features of foreigner talk. A case study
- Translanguaging and multilingual literacies: diary-based case studies of adolescents in an international school
- Discrete bilectalism: towards co-overt prestige and diglossic shift in Cyprus
- Strasbourg revisited: c'est chic de parler français
- Afrikaans in contact with English: endangered language or case of exceptional bilingualism?
- The Basque Street Survey: Two Decades of Assessing Language Use in Public Spaces
