Multilingualism, Symbolism and Illusions in 19th-century Advertising Discourse: The Case of Pula Newspapers

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse some of the characteristics of 19th-century advertising discourse in the city of Pula in the period from the 1880s until 1918. The main purpose of the analysis is to examine the modes in which the semiotic materials and meanings from the cultural and historical reality were reelaborated and represented in the advertising discourse. As the main Austrian military port, situated on the crossroads between three cultural areas (German, Slavic, Romance), Pula was culturally and linguistically a very heterogeneous city. The analysis will consider advertisements printed in newspapers in German (Polaer Tagblatt/Morgenblatt), Italian (L’Eco di Pola, Il Popolo Istriano, Il Giornaletto di Pola), and Croatian (Naša sloga, Hrvatski list). In 19th-century advertising two relevant phenomena are closely linked to the multilingual context of the city of Pula. The first relates to the attestation of so-called bilingual advertisements, and the second refers to advertising of the very same product in three different languages depending on the language of the newspaper. Two additional semiotic features of the advertising discourse linked to the hallmark of multilingualism will also be analysed: (1) references to local events (city events, different epidemics), (2) the evocation of the global context (the First World War, world congresses, universal exhibitions). It will be argued that multilingualism together with local and global references had an impact on the recognition of advertising discourse as one of the relevant social discourses of the period, and that it influenced the formation of collective identities as well as the construction and distribution of knowledge, insights and experiences.

Ključne riječi: advertising, multilingualism, the 19th century, Pula, semiotics