Análisis léxico-semántico del uso de apreciativos en los mercados de Cuenca, Ecuador

Abstract

Language maintains a strong relationship with the social context, since it adapts, modifies and evolves depending on the communicative situation. Sociolinguistics studies these changes and aims to understand the linguistic variables of a community of speakers. The objective of the present research work starts from variationist sociolinguistics and analyzes through pragmatics the appreciative utterances used by market vendors in the markets of the city of Cuenca in the process of buying and selling products. We argue that these terms captivate the customer's attention, creating a warm and trusting environment that minimizes the social, cultural and economic differences between trader and consumer. This study uses a mixed, qualitative ethnographic methodology, consisting of direct observations and interactions with vendors to collect the corpus. From the results obtained, we conclude that the appreciatives used by the merchants of the sierra region are made up of the diminutive and possessive, and, on the other hand, certain locutions used indicate that this trade has a predominantly macho and conservative way of thinking. All this constitutes a linguistic and cultural heritage that makes possible further studies on linguistics.