Ads — part of our lives: Linguistic awareness of powerful advertising

Abstract

Introduction Advertising is a discourse that epitomizes ‘powerful’ language. Language is not only static, rigid and precise but also dynamic, volatile, fluid and malleable. These characteristics are primarily prominent in its social function, as language is used in various discourse types or genres. Language is particularly dynamic, and is malleable in its interplay with social systems in various discourse types, such as advertising. Such is the significance of the social function of language that Michel Foucault defines culture in terms of ‘orders of discourse’.2 Therefore, it has come as no surprise that in recent years attention has shifted from what has been called ‘the scientific study of language‘ — the study of language within sentence boundaries — to the study of language as the raw material of a multiplicity of discourse types, such as literature, the news and advertising.