The approach to the study of the possibilities offered by the journalistic discursive tradition in the characterization of a specific language state can be decisive when drawing conclusions about the oral features of a text written in a given time period. And while it is true that graphic matters will have to be examined with caution when assessing possible linguistic changes –by virtue of the continuous shifting of forms– it is also true that the use of different typographic highlighting mechanisms (italics, bold, small capitals, etc.) could reveal implicit linguistic attitudes, paradoxically specified by a formal instrument that operates on the letterform. In this sense, the author of an editorial or an informational article could use the intended inclination of a graphic type, in order to show what is really said, regardless of whether or not they agree with the method, even though the inclusion of the highlight already implies taking sides. Under the leitmotiv of this idea, we have looked at the use of modifications of the form of letters in the Costa Rican press of the nineteenth century, in order to recover those lexical elements that were intuited as alien to pure Castilian Spanish. This research process aims to fulfill two objectives: 1) identify Costa Rican or Central American idioms and Americanisms, and 2) conclude which linguistic attitudes were hidden in the speaker-writer of that time period. From a methodological point of view, the concept of “discursive traditions” will be used, in order to delimit the specific occurrences of these methods of highlighting letters in a specific typological field, so that the conclusions drawn are filtered through the mechanisms of a methodological domain that imply the relationship between writer/composer, the sociocultural
determinants that revolve around the resulting production, the place and moment of the composition, the genre and subgenre of the analyzed text, or the repercussions that the lexicographical and grammatical works of the time exerted on the letterform.
Keywords:
historical orthotypography, historical sociolinguistics, linguistic attitudes, discursive traditions
Rivas Zancarrón, M. (2018). The letterform of graphic types as a form of expression of a linguistic attitude in the Costa Rican press of the nineteenth Century. Boletín De Filología, 53(1), pp. 237–275. Retrieved from https://actabioethica.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/50647
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