Discourse Analysis in the Field of Advertising: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Advertising has aroused the interest of linguists for many years in the sense that they have attempted to describe its language and to discover the principles of its structure. As regards its language, it appears to be concrete and this con- creteness leads us to a well-defined social purpose: to persuade the audience with the aim of promoting sales of a particular kind of product. The main purpose of this article is going to be focused on the textual analysis of two advertisements concerned with two brands of watches (TISSOT and PATEK PHILIPPE) taking into account the differences and similarities between them with regard to the following fields: non-linguistic textual features (the image) and its relationship with the text itself; the linguistic situation (type of discourse), the content (semantic structure) and the form (grammatical structure and vocabulary). Although both texts advertise almost identical products, they differ in language, design, structure and the kind of audience they are addressed to. Nevertheless, their language is a good example of language adapted to the same social purpose: to make the audience buy a particular kind of product, in both cases a watch. Furthermore, the language used by the advertisers is closely linked to a visual image through which the addressee can appreciate the commercial message very well. Both, the linguistic structure and the visual image, iconically related, are arranged strategi- cally so as to get a precise material goal.