Analysis of the Deictic Markers in the Language of Advertisement

Abstract

Language plays a crucial role in the process of social interaction, i.e.

communication, as it is used both as a medium in giving information and  as a means of  establishing and maintaining relationship with other people. The study of language as a means of  communication has become an important aspect in linguistics. Furthermore, Lyons (1969: 275) mentions that  " Every language-utterance is made in a particular place and at a particular time: it occurs in a certain spatio-temporal situation". Each  utterance is made by a particular  person(the speaker) and is usually addressed to some other person (the hearer).

Communication from the perspective of advertising takes into consideration the contextual dimension  that is a matter of pragmatic which investigate those parts of the discourse that are often the essential factors of the advertising discourse and its hidden message.

The discourse of advertisement became the subject of  extensive linguistic research. Advertising is a tool of persuasion .The advertisers make use of persuasive  strategies  in  order to reach their goals, i.e. to

persuade a consumer to buy the product. To put in other terms, they encode the message to reach the target message. Traditionally, deixis in discourse analysis underlines the relationship between the language and context that has been defined through language of spatial, or temporal context.

The  research aims at  analyzing  the language of advertisement in terms of person, place, time and social deixis. The notion of deixis is applied in the present study in order to introduce and handle the features of language of advertisement. The timing, place, message  have their importance in the communicating process. The research also aims to analyze the words and the language terms in the situational terms, related to the context cultural, temporal, spatial, social context.

The research hypothesizes the following:

1.Person deixis , spatial deixis and temporal deixis are more frequently used in the language of advertisement compared to the  social deixis.

2.Deictic expressions are one of the essential strategies used by the advertisers to create a persuasive advertising message and contribute to

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adopting familiar ,conversational tone.

3.Dectic words rely on the situation or context of utterance. They create a unified spatial and temporal frame common on both the addresser and addressee. Thus, the role of all deictic words is contextualize and lace the text within the addressee environment.

The  research   is  an  analytical   study  of   the  types of deixis in the language of advertisements. In  order  to  conduct  a  data – given  study,   the   researcher   has  built  a  data of  over 70  English advertisements. Advertising  language features  can  be summarized  and  a possible  conclusion  can  be given in the light of  persuasiveness and  effectiveness of advertising . Leech ,1966 ;Downing ,2000 are the models  of  analysis used  as the  basis  for  the  analytical  work .In  addition, the researcher  makes  use of  the following  procedures  :

1.Selecting representative  examples from T.V. as a sample in the research and to find more examples,  advertisements on  the World Wide Web   are adopted .

2.Some  data are  quoted  from  the books such as  Advertising,  The   Language of Advertising ,Linguistic  Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language ,etc… .Simple random data are chosen to prove or refute  the hypotheses of

the  research.

3.Presenting a survey of the concept of  the language of advertising

as discussed by various scholars and to review of the types of deixis

and its features.