USAGE OF LINGUISTIC MEANS IN ADVERTISMENT DISCOURSE

REVIEW FROM THE VIEW POINT OF SPEECH ACTS THEORY AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This paper aims to present the inventory of discursive, syntactic and lexical means which are used as the basis for the systematization of typical illocutionary acts in advertising contents. The subject matter of this study is the advertisement discourse which is analysed from the perspective of the pragmatic aspect of the language, i.e. from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. For the purposes of this work, a group of advertisements was selected, all of which had appeared in October and November 2014, both on TV and in the weekly magazines Blic žena, Story and Lepota & zdravlje. The first step was classifying the collected expressions according to the illocutionary force that they performed within the theory of speech acts, which was then followed by a critical analysis of the verbal elements in commercials according to their communicative function. The aim of this advertisement discourse analysis is to describe and integrate the linguistic means which are used to lure potential customers into buying the products in question. Based on the processed data, we have determined the illocutionary force of the linguistic utterance and established which linguistic means are dominant in the verbal strategy of that kind. Critical approach to the discourse has shown the way in which linguistic means serve the purpose of furtive persuasion attempts.