Abstract

VERGARA-HEIDKE, Adrián  and  TORRES-CALDERON, Gina. Semiotics resources in advertisements on disabilities in the Costa Rican print media. Comunicación [online]. 2019, vol.28, n.1, pp.61-75. ISSN 1659-3820.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18845/rc.v28i1-2019.4446.

This research shows the results of the multimodal analysis of 68 advertisements on disability published from 2014 to 2016 in the three newspapers of largest circulation in Costa Rica (La Nación, Diario Extra and La Teja). The advertisements were collected, catalogued and analyzed using the theory of multimodality by Kress and Van Leuwen (2001, 2002, 2006) to determine how semiotic modes question the construction of discourses on disability. The semiotic resources used in the ads are established to determine the characterization of people with disabilities. The study concludes that the advertisements create meaning through semiotic interrelation, that is, through multimodality, and the linguistic and paralinguistic resources that compose the advertisements must be valued for them to be fully understood. Furthermore, after the analysis, the study determines that the advertisements continue to promote a discriminatory discourse evidenced by the discrepancy between the iconic component of the advertisement and the linguistic one, since the former gives prominence to the PwD, but the linguistic component shows that advertisers play a predominant role and PwD are relegated to secondary roles.

Keywords : disability; Semiotic; Advertising; multimodality; Multimodal Advertising; Critical Discourse Analysis.

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