Pragmatics in persuasive discourse of Spanish television advertising (Chile, Spain, United States)

This study provides a pragmalinguistic analysis of data from one type of permissive discourse, television advertising. Although Spanish advertising theory may be influenced by English advertising, pragmatic devices are linguistically encoded in different ways in different languages (Jensen, 1982; Blum-Kulka, 1989; Vierzbicka, 1991). This investigation offers an analysis of pragmatic ways in which Spanish is used to achieve persuasion within a specified context.; The study applies pragmatic models from Lakoff (1982) and Geis (1982 and other models to television advertising from three Spanish speaking countries. The questions addressed are: (1) Which pragmatic devices occur most frequently in Spanish television advertising? (2) How are these pragmatic devices linguistically encoded in the data? (3) Are any pragmatic differences evident between regional varieties of Spanish? (4) How are pragmalinguistic features of television advertising used to effect persuasion? The corpus includes 723 television commercials for products and services from each of dime countries, Chile (Teletrece), Spain (Antena (3),and the United States (Univision). Each ad was examined for the presence of a wide variety of pragmalinguistic features.; The variables most representative of the discourse of Spanish television advertising include speech acts, indexicals, politeness, implicatures, violations of Grice's Maxims, and speaker considerations. This investigation examines both the general and specific ways in which these variables are realized linguistically. Furthermore, analysis of three varieties of Spanish suggests that general pragmatic strategies are similar across regions; however, some differences occur in individual strategies. Finally, major pragmatic devices in the study repeatedly contribute to the goals of persuasion as defined. in the classical rhetoric of persuasion outlined by Rank (1968) and Leech (1966).; This study contributes to the cross-linguistic understanding of pragmatics and persuasion in Spanish because it (1) offers a procedure that may be replicated; (2) addresses multiple pragmatic categories; and (3) examines the relationship between pragmatic strategies and persuasion among Spanish speakers. Given the vital role of the media in society, Spanish television advertising reflects the pragmatic communication of persuasion by and to Spanish speakers.