(Being) 'Susanita' as a discursive construction: a semantic, pragmatic and cognitive study of its use in Argentine media
Keywords:
Quino's character, diminutive, proper noun, lexicalization, pragmaticalizationAbstract
Discourses construct and sustain mental models that impose interpretive frameworks on social issues. Through language use, discursive subjects not only account for their processes of subjectivization, but also configure themselves in a specific context and permanently construct and redefine their social and cultural constructs. This paper proposes a semantic, pragmatic and cognitive description of the media occurrences of the segment “(being) Susanita” according to speakers’ use in Argentina. We resort to the postulates of the Cognitive Grammar (cognitive-prototypical approach) (Langacker, 1987), Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982), Idealized Cognitive Models (ICM) (Lakoff, 1987), and Grammaticalization and Lexicalization (Hopper and Traugott, 1993), as well as those related to discursive construction (Croft & Cruise, 2004; Goldberg, 1995). We collected 27 instances of the segment under study from Argentine media and analyzed them based on the ICMs of the character Susanita from Quino's comic strip. We found that while the character concentrates a multiplicity of traits that are constructed from her participation in the narrative of the strip and that are stereotypical of diverse social groups, speakers’ use of “(being) Susanita” in the media highlights the value of motherhood and the need for women to have many children. In conclusion, we observe that media use of “(being) Susanita” contributes to reinforcing and redefining social representations linked to gender stereotypes and ideal models of behavior.
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