The current study has explored the language of 30 non-commercial advertisements, both quantitatively and qualitatively, within the framework of pragmatics. The main incentive was to conduct an investigation into how the advertiser working with such a philanthropic genre employs attention-seeking, informing and persuading functions when she communicates with her audience. Orbiting around key notions of Relevance Theory (1986; 1995; 2012) and Tanaka’s pragmatic approach to advertising (2005), the study attempted to determine whether non-commercial advertising differs from its commercial counterpart in terms of informing and persuading intentions, and to examine the extent to which non-commercial advertising relies on internal and external contexts in its explicit and implicit language. The findings show that non-commercial advertising utilises attention-seeking, informing and persuading functions in a variable fashion since they can be incorporated into complex arrangements in which they sometimes overlap or collaborate. This fuse appears to enable the advertiser to achieve her intended meaning at the same time as she can make efficient use of space and time. The study also found that there are non-commercial advertisements that completely lack persuasion. By excluding explicit and implicit imperative speech acts, conjunctive adjuncts and pronouns that involve the audience, such advertisements appear to be solely objective and informative. In turn, these findings suggest that the informing function in non-commercial advertising is not always subordinated to the persuading function, which contrasts with the informing-persuading hierarchy in commercial advertising. Finally, since the creator of non-commercial advertising frequently exposes her audience to weak relevance, she requires them to locate and solve explicatures and implicatures with help from both internal and external contexts, which strengthens Tanaka’s (2005) claim that advertisers treat their audience as potentially creative and resourceful once attention has been attracted and sustained.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hh-42269 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Rath Foley, Anna |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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