Search

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]

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]