The language of advertising: A pedagogically-related attempt to break the code

Mendoza

Congreso; Primera Conferencia Latino-americana de Lingüística Sistémico Funcional y la Enseñanza de la Gramática: Systemic functional linguistics in language education; 2004

Departamento de Inglés. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo

Critical Discourse Analysis attempts to describe, interpret and explain discourse as a form of social, cultural and ideological practice (Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995). CDA sets out to accomplish such purpose through the analysis of texts. Discourse is conceived as a three-dimensional construct "consisting of a (socio)linguistic dimension, a sociocultural dimension and a sociopolitical dimension" (Kumaravadivelu, 1999, p. 469). On the other hand, text is seen as "a theoretical abstract construct which underlies what is normally understood as discourse" (Van Dijk, 1977, p. 32). In order to exemplify how patterns of discourse interact with socio-cultural structures and ideology and make a text mean what it does, this paper focuses on the discourse of advertisements. One aim is to analyse a print advertisement along the conceptual framework of CDA. Another aim is to link the theoretical discussion to pedagogical concerns or, more specifically, to draw out insights for classroom exploitation related particularly to CDA's emphasis on "critical awareness of language and discursive practices" (Fairclough, 1995, p. 140). The analysis follows a macro-micro perspective organisation. The first section of the paper contributes a brief contextualisation of CDA in terms of influencing theoretical sources. The second section includes a brief discussion of the three-stage procedure proposed by Fairclough (1995) to understand hidden "power relations and ideological processes in discourse" (p.109). This section contains a text-based examination of the ad in terms of the ways in which linguistic patterns realise contextual dimensions of culture and social situation.