El uso social de los apodos como discurso sintético en las sociedades rurales

Abstract

This work provides an account of the universality of nicknames and their continuance in rural societies, as well as their everyday use as identifiers and as a nexus of coexistence. They constitute a rich, intangible heritage in agricultural societies because of their extensive network of semantic and pragmatic relations. At the same time, they also constitute the essence of a type of synthetic discourse that is highly profitable because of its linguistic economy, albeit remaining highly expressive and creative. It comes in epigraphs that explain the social use of these appellations, taking into account its linguistic, social, sociolinguistic, discursive and scientific dimensions. The corpus of nicknames used in this study is taken from several towns in the central Iregua Valley, La Rioja, Spain.