HIspanic and Lusophone Linguistics Association (HaLLA) Meeting

The present study focuses on a Spanish-language television commercial for Inglés Sin Barreras, a highly popular and highly advertised English-language program. A multimodal social semiotic analysis based on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996, 2001) social semiotic analysis and Hallidayan (1978, 1985) linguistics is carried out in order to ascertain how ideology and power are expressed in verbal and visual modes of communication.

The commercial functions within an overarching ideology of barriers, where the physical barriers that separate Latin America from the United States are extended to include linguistic, social, and economic barriers that separate Latino immigrants from the United States. The visual analysis reveals a strong affinity between the commercial's announcer and the viewer, rendering the crossing of barriers possible. Social proximity is visually realized through direct gaze, medium and close shots, and frontal and eye-level camera angles. However, the verbal analysis establishes barriers between the announcer and the viewer through ideologically contested vocabulary and pronouns, resulting in the divergence of meaning across modes that is indicative of traditional advertising patterns. The present contribution underscores the need for further study of Spanish-language texts using the multimodal social semiotics approach.