ANALYSIS OF MEDIA

Analysis of Media

Analysis of Media and Advertisement

Introduction

Media produces and reflects much of the public language used in society. The institution of advertising generates media language that is designed for mass consumption with a readily identifiable goal: to convince its audience to buy or use a product or service. Advertising provides linguist with an opportunity to study “language in use” with a persuasive purpose and the discourse-pragmatic features of language that are used for persuasion. Among the studies that examine the language of advertising, some suggest that there are two main types of advertising discourse—labeled by Simpson (2001) as “reason” and “tickle” (see also Cook, 1992; Hermerén, 1999; Vestergaard & Schroeder, 1985). According to Simpson, in reason advertising, advertisers try to persuade the consumer by making direct and easy-to-decipher reference to a motive or a reason for the purchase, whereas tickle advertising takes a more “oblique” approach by appealing to humor, emotions, and mood. Although these and other linguistic features of advertising have been surveyed, exemplified, and analyzed in studies that focus on the language of advertising, the question remains as to whether one advertising tactic is preferred over another and if so, why a particular advertising tactic is chosen for a particular advertisement. Simpson (2001) notes that the choice of tactic preferred may depend on the “nature of the product has marketed” (p. 605).

There have been studies in various disciplines surveying the persuasive strategies used in advertising and explaining the philosophy of the buyer culture as well as the manipulative dangers of advertising, but there have not been any studies focusing on the discourse variation among advertisements that feature different categories of products and consumer groups and investigating the types of advertising strategies that are mainly used for promoting a particular commodity or targeting a particular social group. This study attempts to fill this gap by providing a sociolinguistic analysis of print advertising data from a variety of consumer magazines and comparing how discourse and pragmatic strategies used for persuasion vary according to product type or target audience.

Aim and Objective

The purpose of the study will be to examine the discourse of print advertising and its pragmatic/linguistic features that are used to effect persuasion. It will attempt to find trends or preferential tendencies in persuasive strategies used by advertisers that characterize and distinguish between different types of advertisements. The project centers on the pragmatic issues of face and politeness and conversational maxims/implicature and discourse properties (such as information structure) of advertising language and examines the patterns of the discourse and pragmatic strategies that may correlate with product types advertised and target magazine audiences.

Research questions

We have developed the following research question to conduct this study: (1) What are some major pragmatic and discourse strategies for persuasion that characterize magazine advertisements of cars, direct-to-consumer prescription medication, and snack foods and candy? (2) Are there any noticeable variations evident among the advertisements in terms of the preferred pragmatic and discourse strategies?

Chapter 2: Literature review

To analyze an advertisement, one must look ...