Pardis Zaferani (Islamic Azad)
Saturday, May 19th
Buchanan A hallway on the 2nd floor
Advertisement as influential mode of discourse is a good instance of the creative use of persuasive strategies which can be demonstrated through language; accordingly, it is still language that forms the crucial part and distinctive function of advertising. The present comparative work aims to provide the analysis of language of advertising from systemic functional point of view and identifies linguistic means used in selected samples of Persian and English advertising texts. Since advertising texts take advantage of using made-up or modified words and expressions in order to bear the creative characteristic of this mode of discourse, for the purpose of text analysis, the work focuses on Halliday´s theory of textual metafunction to investigate realization of the clause constituents in terms of textual systems. For this end, the descriptive statistics, here specifically, the total frequency and percentage of different types of Theme in English and Persian advertising texts were conducted across two languages. The findings show how ingenious selection of textual elements by copywriter calls attention to the way meaning is constructed so as to impress audience. While indicating structural differences between English and Persian, the findings comparatively supported the rationale behind different grammatical information occurrences to justify structural differences and similarities between English and Persian advertisements. Bearing in mind the fact that creativity is an important principle in both languages and regarding cohesive features applied, more diversity is examined in the ways of expressing the content of English ads in comparison with Persian ads.
Key words: Advertisement, Systemic Functional Grammar, Creative Discourse
