Speech Acts in Written Advertisements: Identification, Classification and Analysis

Abstract

The Speech Act Theory was first introduced by philosophers and then approached by pragmatists and discourse analysts. While philosophers and pragmatists deal with speech acts in fabricated texts, discourse analysts focus on their occurring in real discourses. Another important distinction between these two lines of research is that philosophy and pragmatics study speech acts in isolation, while discourse analysis points to their linear and hierarchical organisation, trying to identify recurring patterns in various genres. The present paper approaches speech acts from an interdisciplinary perspective. Using a series of illocutionary force indicating devices, the paper identifies, classifies and analyses the types of speech acts used in written advertisements. The findings point out the advertisers’ preference of using some speech acts over others with the aim of obtaining the intended effect on the target audience. This quantitative analysis is performed on a corpus of eighty-four written advertisements selected from various newspapers and magazines, and the results can be viewed as genre-defining.