Warning messages in cigarettes packages: a comparative linguistic-discursive approach

Abstract

Warning messages in the cigarette packages are a textual manifestation of a relation that establishes between the sanitary authorities, the tobacco companies and the consumers of tobacco products. Although the studies of this type of texts are numerous, almost do not exist approaches from a discursive, semantic or linguistic point of view. From the integration of categories of discourse analysis, cognitive semantics and the study of the linguistic hedging, a multilingual corpus was analyzed to determine the similarities and the differences that emerged between the geographic divisions of the corpus. For the analysis, a set of 8 categories were determined which were applied successively in the corpus. From the results, it can be inferred that, while some categories distinguish the geographic zones clearly, others behave of homogenously in all subdivisions of the corpus. As much the differences as the found similarities allow us to characterize the different production conditions of these texts in the studied geographic zones.