The lexical variation maestro-profesor: a pragmatic-discursive study

Abstract

Following a discursive-pragmatic approach to linguistic variation, the goal of this paper is to analyse the lexical variation maestro-profesor in a sample of official documents of primary state schools and privately-owned but state-funded ones in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha (Spain). The analysis reveals that the lexical alternative profesor, significantly more common in the corpus than maestro, can be considered a case of uplifting euphemism intended to upgrade and magnify the professional status and social appreciation of teachers in infant and primary education. In this way, profesor plays an important role as a face-saving device which is part of a more general strategy of positive self-presentation for schoolteachers that may introduce some degree of ambiguity in the message conveyed.