The Colonization Of Advertising Genre In Political Campaign Speeches

Since the 1980s, genre analysis has become firmly established as one of the most popular frameworks in which academic inquiry can be utilized to interpret particular communicative events. In addition, genre analysis has also served as a means to educational capacity building, in that it aims at equipping learners with the knowledge and skills they need to communicate successfully in particular situations, thus offering a practical access to socially powerful forms of language. Along the passage of development, genre theory has evolved into three branches: ESP Camp, the Sydney School and the New Rhetoric Group. All the work of these three branches has contributed greatly to our understanding of the way discourse is used in academic, professional and other institutional contexts.However, much of research work on genre analysis has centered on standardized and conventionalized generic forms, which has served the cause of the language teaching and learning extremely well, particular in the context of ESP and professional communication. Unavoidably, there has been a negative influence of this practice as well, in that it has encouraged analysts and practitioners to focus on idealized and somewhat pure generic forms, and as a result, to ignore the realities of the real world discourse. There is an imminent need to understand and account for the realities of discourse as we sense them—complex, dynamic and constantly changing, not necessarily as we would like to describe it. In other words, there is a wide gap between genre analyses of texts in published literature, emphasizing the idealization and simplification of individual genres, and the variety of rather complex and dynamic instances of hybridized or mixed genre that we tend to encounter in the real world.The research undertaken in this dissertation attempts to address such imminent need and fill in the present gap by investigating the colonization of advertising genre in the political campaign speeches. To obtain an adequate and comprehensive understanding of this topic, the research presented here works to situate analysis within three branches of genre theory, drawing on the merits of their individual approach. The analytical framework constructed for the research embraces three dimensional perspectives, linguistic, socio- cognitive and socio-critical and takes into account two-layer analysis, contextual and textual. The research corpus consists of thirty print advertisements and five political campaign speeches. The analysis is mainly qualitative and involves limited quantitative elements due to the nature and scope of the research.The dissertation is composed of six chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces the research background, its objective and organization of the dissertation. Chapter two extensively reviews the relevant literature and thus lays foundation for the research. Chapter three systematically formulates the research methodology, delineating the investigation perspectives, layers of analysis and the research process. Chapter four elaborates on the findings of genre analysis of print advertisements, thus pulling out common threads and patterns that represent powerful strategies aimed at promoting the products. Chapter five dives into the genre of political campaign speeches and explores the appropriation of advertising conceits into the persuasive political campaign literature. This chapter then sheds light on what kinds of advertising strategies politicians implement to promote their candidacy and how these strategies are played out linguistically. Chapter six conclusively sketches how the advertising genre acts to colonize or commercialize the political discourse linguistically and ideologically. Also this chapter discusses the evolution of political campaign speeches, the significance of the research,the limitation of the study and ideas for the further study.As noted above, the dynamic and complex nature of real world discourse has been underplayed in the existing literature on genre theory and practice. The study of generic colonization is relatively young and the correlative relation between the advertising genre and the political campaign discourse remains untouched. The research undertaken in the dissertation will definitely contribute to these areas that are before ignored within a bulk of the literature. Moreover, the findings from the two separate genre analyses of print advertisements and campaign speeches will surely facilitate people's understanding of the construction processes and critical interpretations of both genres that so dominate our society today. Finally, the multi-perspective and two-layered analytical framework constructed in the dissertation will be of considerable value to the future research of genre analysis practitioners.