Analyzing Advertising Language in Written Discourse

Abstract

This study is an attempt to investigate the discourse of written advertisements to explore the role of linguistics and culture in shaping them. This study investigates the following objectives: in social context advertisements both are influenced and influence the social context where they occur, the function of advertisements is to convey information to persuade people to buy their products, and as such, it needs specific language, it reveals the complex relationship between textual and visual components of advertisements "coherence" and to know the meaning of advertisements is arise from the combination of multiple factors, language, paralanguage, picture, participants, co-text, and inter-text. The study adopted the content analysis methodology which dealt with the written documents and material and then analyze the written advertisements. Data was collected from Sudan Vision newspaper (2009), the samples were chosen randomly from the total number of ad, the data analyzing through textual analysis methodology. The study reached the following results: advertising is treated as ordinary communication, and that advertising language is treated as ordinary language. It is important to remember that the virtually unconscious act of getting the basic meaning of an advertisement is quite different from further issues of interpreting. Advertising language is not qualitatively different from ordinary language. Advertising language tends not to use clear markers of cohesion, but is interpreted as being coherent. The study recommends that; the advantage to confining study to one product is that the study can then be compared to other studies and different product categories in the future, influenced suddenly by economic crisis that with its consequences has changed many aspects of consumption of advertisements.