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This paper analyses the advertising discourses about social commitment in Spanish. Businesses express trough them their values and describe their activity for helping in any social cause, such as environment, sustainable economy, decent jobs, or human rights. These are texts found on company websites and are usually longer than many other types of messages realised by any business. The argumentation is not aimed directly at sales, but at improving the public image of the company itself. This image-work in turn serves as an argument for users to trust the company. Due to this special argumentative activity, this research pursues to identify the main mechanisms of textual construction aimed at this persuasive purpose. To this end, a macrosyntax model is applied. This presupposes the existence of a discourse grammar and defines textual units, categories, and functions from a pragmatic approach. This model allows to explain the main discursive phenomena which create this type of advertising texts, such as a moderate density of information, a low hierarchisation of information, the use of topics, a tendency to express coordination or the abundant use of gerunds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban mobility model based on the use of the private car has important environmental and spatial consequences in contemporary cities. Nonetheless, the automotive industry has attempted to refuse these negative impacts employing a rhetoric discourse following their self-interests. Advertising has become a valuable tool for that purpose: beyond its commercial function, it transfers to the consumer certain symbolic meanings that are juxtaposed on the car in so far as merchandise. Thus, through the advertising message, an intentional and biased image of urban landscapes and public spaces is constructed, playing an important role at the service of the car industry and the road traffic. This paper addresses these mechanisms of production and reproduction of a deliberate image through the Critical Discourse Analysis. For that purpose, a sample of 81 car adverts broadcasted in Spanish TV channels was examined. Using both representations of specific cities and other idealized models, it is concluded that car advertising projects a softened urban image, reducing the complexity of urban forms and functions to a mere scenery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the special argumentation of the advertising messages as part of a strategy of persuasion. Considering the ability of the advertising messages language to spread its own usages, it is relevant the study of the syntactic formulas used with argumentative aim. The formulas with si (English: if) conjuction, which strengthen the creation of real or imagined situations, are very often used in printed advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]