Abstract
This paper investigates the lexical items used in online automobile advertising to characterize the motorcar as a luxury product. The main questions examined are, firstly, how certain words are interpreted as denoting luxury concepts by potential readers, and, secondly, whether luxury and non-luxury marques differ in the use of these units. The issues here are addressed from a double theoretical framework: a theory of luxury, which allows for the identification and classification of the vocabulary of luxury, and Relevance Theory, a pragmatic model which explains how words are subject to pragmatic modulation during interpretation, leading to the construction of ad hoc concepts.
Publisher
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics