Analysis Of Interdiscursivity In Social Media Advertising Discourse From The Perspective Of CGA

With the popularity of brand-owned social media advertisements,promotional videos,as a new form of promotional discourse,have gradually become a professional discursive practice that helps brands fulfill their communicative purposes.Meanwhile,in the discourse construction,professional writers often appropriate and exploit generic resources to achieve social and private intentions.Promotional discourse itself is dynamic and innovative in nature,so under the impact of changed consumer behaviors in the new media,various professional discourses are often incorporated into it to achieve multiple communicative purposes.Hence,with the purpose of exploring how various communicative purposes are achieved through interdiscursive phenomenon in the social media advertising discourse and possible underlying causes,a corpus of 98 product promoting videos was collected from Apple’s You Tube channel for study.Drawing on Bhatia’s(2017)framework of Critical Genre Analysis(CGA),together with Swales’ move analysis model,Bhatia’s interpretation of interdiscursivity in professional discourse and Dentsu Group’s AISAS consumer behavior model,this research tries to address the following three research questions: 1)What is the generic structure of promotional video transcripts released on Apple’s You Tube channel in terms of move structure? 2)How is interdiscursivity across different professional discourses demonstrated in the moves of Apple’s promotional video transcripts? 3)Why do Apple advertisers produce social media promotional videos with interdiscursive discourses?After a comprehensive analysis of all sample transcripts,the author has acquired the following results.1.At the genre-text level,the author has found that,in order to elicit desired responses through attracting consumers’ attention,convincing consumers of the benefits of the product,committing viewers to the actual transaction and maintaining followers’ interest,the video designers selectively adjust and arrange the following seven moves: 1)Headlines,2)Establishing credentials,3)Detailing the product/Offering tips for use/Celebrity or typical user endorsement,4)Enclosing the related topic hashtags,5)Showing highlights,6)Enclosing the official website product purchase hyperlink,7)Enclosing the background music hyperlink,of which Move 1,Move 3,Move 5,and Move 6 are obligatory moves while Move 2,Move 4 and Move 7 are optional moves.2.At the level of professional practice,this study makes a critical comparison of the moves of these videos with four inextricably related discourses: promotional discourse,instructional discourse,social discourse and informative discourse.Linguistic evidence sufficiently demonstrates that Apple’s promotional videos share fundamental generic and linguistic natures with manuals,tutorials,technical reports and stories.3.Finally,at the level of the professional culture,it is found that the changed consumer behaviors influenced by the new media urges the advertisers to rely on mixed discourses to realize their overall communicative purpose.In other words,interdiscoursivity in the promotional video transcripts helps advertisers better attract consumers’ attention,arouse their interest and finally elicit desired responses from them,including searching brand information,making buying decision,sharing brand information with other consumers and catching up with the brand information.