RELEVANCE THEORY APPLIED TO ADVERTISING DISCOURSE
RELEVANCE THEORY APPLIED TO ADVERTISING DISCOURSE

Summary/Abstract: As a result of technological innovations and globalization advertisements have come to surpass their primary economic function becoming regulators and establishing social norms and trends, representing ideologies, creating utopian lifestyles, rather than simply trying to persuade the receiver into buying. Also, we can observe a shift from an explicit to an implicit meaning in discourse construction which leads to the apparent empowering of the receiver in the decoding process. Its persuasive nature which can be perceived as a particularity among other types of discourse has become of great interest among many researchers from different fields of study likes psychology, linguistics, sociology, media studies etc. (Brierley 1995, Messaris 1997, John & Nicholas O'Shaugnessy, 2003, Fletcher 2008, Armstrong 2010, Beasley & Danesi, 2010). Starting with Wilson & Sperberřs Relevance theory (1986, 1995, 1998, 2002) we intend to interpret and analyze print advertisements based on the principles of ostensive-inferential communication. We have selected 4 Romanian and Japanese print advertisements/billboards, two created between the `50s-`60s and the other two after 2010 in order to have a contrastive perspective over discourse construction. This parallel allows us to observe recurrent elements and common strategies in two completely different cultural and social contexts and to identify the ways in which language is used to persuade, seduce and manipulate the receiver. Our aim is to reveal the steps followed by the receiver in decoding a message with two or more possible interpretations as in the case of advertisements.

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