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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]

Teleshopping spots represent a paradigmatic example of argumentative and perlocutionary discourse. In them, the creative adopts different strategies in order that the target feels irresistibly attracted by the object he advertises. In this paper we analyze all the elements that, because of their individual discoursive nature, but especially due to their mutual interaction, convert an apparently informative speech into an efficient tool of seduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the main characteristics of advertising discourse in relation to childhood and its engagement with children's view of this stage of life, in line with «new social studies» and critical discourse analysis. This discussion seeks to complement the functionalist perspective of communication studies in the field of advertising content analysis by incorporating a discursive focus, taking into account contextual issues that may condition the interpretation of messages. Firstly, discourse analysis was used as a means of exploring social representations, identifying stereotypes employed in children's advertising in order to establish the possible functions of the message. To contrast these findings, group interviews were conducted with 10 and 11 year-old boys and girls from middle-income families in Santiago, Chile. A comparison of both findings reveals a complex and relational notion of childhood. Children see themselves as burdened by parents, and adulthood as an effective lack of liberty, where the archetypes reveal an image of the adult world as a state of loss with respect to the exercise of creativity, imagination and freedom. These archetypes correlate to children's television output, where a number of shows ridicule the image of adults through irony and parody, presenting them as incompetent in their roles as parents and in their moral authority. [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]