A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF DUREX ADVERTISEMENTS

The objectives of the research are (1) to identify the types of linguistic features employed in Durex advertisements, (2) to describe the advertising contexts of Durex advertisements, and (3) to reveal the communicative functions of Durex advertisements. This research employed discourse analysis as the approach of analysis. It was conducted by using a combination of qualitative and quantitative method. The data of this research were taken from Durex advertisements. The data were in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. The contexts of the data were the texts of Durex advertisements. The technique of data analysis was content analysis. Triangulation was used to establish the reliability of data and to ensure the findings. Hence, it can enhance trustworthiness. The results of this research are explained as follows. First, there are eight types of linguistic features employed in Durex advertisements. Ellipsis is the most often occurring type. Durex wants to provide the information of their products briefly. Moreover, ellipsis makes the sentence short and concise. Second, the eight categories of advertising contexts can be identified in Durex advertisements. It implies that contexts take an important role in advertising. The contexts of advertising determine the way audience perceive the intended messages of the advertisements. In addition, it helps audience to interpret the meaning of the advertisements. Third, Durex advertisements fulfill four general communicative functions of advertisement. It indicates that all forms of advertising deliver messages to consumers. Advertising allows people to know the new product, to make impression on consumer’s mind, to maintain positive attitudes toward the brand, to form a strong motivation to take an action, and to establish a strong brand loyalty for repeated purchases

A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF DUREX ADVERTISEMENTS

The objectives of the research are (1) to identify the types of linguistic features employed in Durex advertisements, (2) to describe the advertising contexts of Durex advertisements, and (3) to reveal the communicative functions of Durex advertisements. This research employed discourse analysis as the approach of analysis. It was conducted by using a combination of qualitative and quantitative method. The data of this research were taken from Durex advertisements. The data were in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. The contexts of the data were the texts of Durex advertisements. The technique of data analysis was content analysis. Triangulation was used to establish the reliability of data and to ensure the findings. Hence, it can enhance trustworthiness. The results of this research are explained as follows. First, there are eight types of linguistic features employed in Durex advertisements. Ellipsis is the most often occurring type. Durex wants to provide the information of their products briefly. Moreover, ellipsis makes the sentence short and concise. Second, the eight categories of advertising contexts can be identified in Durex advertisements. It implies that contexts take an important role in advertising. The contexts of advertising determine the way audience perceive the intended messages of the advertisements. In addition, it helps audience to interpret the meaning of the advertisements. Third, Durex advertisements fulfill four general communicative functions of advertisement. It indicates that all forms of advertising deliver messages to consumers. Advertising allows people to know the new product, to make impression on consumer’s mind, to maintain positive attitudes toward the brand, to form a strong motivation to take an action, and to establish a strong brand loyalty for repeated purchases

Cartooning for Gender Equality: A Multimodal Expression of ‘Humour’ and ‘Vindication’

This paper attempts to explain how cartoons have become a fast and easy-to-process way to present humorous and yet highly vindicative messages which can be accessed by different people around the world. Therefore, they are increasingly used as an effective means to vindicate significant social issues, such as women’s rights and the claim for equal opportunities. As multimodal texts, they strategically combine different communicative ‘modes’, namely, verbal and non-verbal clues, in order to convey cognitive effects intended to be captured by the readers/viewers in order to grasp the whole meaning of the communicative act. More specifically, the present paper focuses on a selection of cartoons dealing with the controversial issue of gender equality, which have been extracted from newspaper digital editions, web platforms and publications appearing on-line during the period 2011-2014. Following the proposals put forward by Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, the analysis has revealed that the corpus of selected cartoons relies heavily on non-linguistic elements, especially on extremely meaningful visual metaphors, namely, the ‘cross’, the ‘key’, the ‘dart’, the ‘equals sign’ and the ‘scales’ images. This analysis allows us to explore how, by means of these non-verbal clues, cartoonists endow their drawings with a critical and vindicative message that is effectively and globally exposed to a wide international audience. Keywords: Gender equality, cartooning, multimodal texts, women’s rights, Relevance Theor

Politeness strategies in giving and responding to compliments: a sociopragmatics study of compliments in “the devil wears prada”

This research was conducted to discover the way the characters employ compliment also compliment responses and the politeness strategies employed by the characters in giving and responding to compliment in the movie entitled “The Devil Wears Prada”. Five major theories mainly used are Holmes’s Social Dimension’s of Communication, Hymes’ SPEAKING theory, Chaika’s theory of kinesics, and Herbert’s theory of compliment responses, and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness strategies. This research applies a socio-pragmatic approach as the way of analysis. This research is arranged using a descriptive qualitative method. All the dialogs containing compliment and compliment responses were taken as data. The results of the analysis can be seen as follows: First, the compliments delivered by characters come along with combination of non-verbal acts. The addressees respond to compliments in various ways. Four types of compliment responses were delivered by the characters. The responses are appreciation token, scale down, question, and disagreement. The characters respond to the compliment with a combination of verbal and non-verbal acts or only non-verbal acts. Second, all characters employ positive politeness in delivering compliments. In responding compliment, the characters employ different strategies. The strategies are positive politeness, negative politeness, and saying nothing or do not do FTA

Dramatic discourse in poetry.

This thesis is a theoretical and philosophical discussion of the nature\ud of poetic discourse, with a subsequent discussion of pedagogic practice\ud arising from the views expressed, whose effectiveness is illustrated by a\ud subjective selection of protocols. The central claim is that the peculiar\ud nature of poetic discourse is inherently dramatic, since it internalizes\ud 'voices'. Therefore, to achieve a total experience of poetry the reader needs\ud to engage his own schemata in their body/thought entirety. This implies that\ud he has not to limit himself to the 'sounding' of the 'voices' he achieves in\ud the text just within his 'inward ear', but he has to 'embody' them, 'inhabit'\ud them within a 'physical space of representation', letting them inter-act with\ud other readers' embodiments. In so doing, the reader becomes an Acting Reader.\ud The contribution this thesis offers to research on Discourse Analysis\ud and Literary Stylistics consists in recognizing the vocal, 'physical'\ud dimension of poetic texts (a dimension which is often neglected) as a way of\ud achieving a more thorough personal awareness of the poetic experience.\ud Accordingly, I elaborate a principled pedagogic approach to poetic language\ud through the reader's use of drama techniques with the aim to demonstrate how\ud it can be relevant in the teaching of poetry to either Ll or L2 students at\ud both High School and University levels.\ud So that in the theoretical part (Chapters 1-4) I place my rationale\ud against a context of 'new-critic', semiotic, and deconstructionist approaches\ud to literary theory and teaching methodology to demonstrate how they imply only\ud a one-way communication of a pre-established interpretation (Chapters 1-2).\ud Then I describe the first 'two phases' of the reader's activation of\ud 'familiarizing' top-down and 'defamiliarizing' bottom-up strategies in his\ud attempt to authenticate the peculiar structural and semantic arrangement of\ud the poetic text (Chapter 3). Eventually, these two top-down/bottom-up phases\ud come to merge during the final interactive phase (Chapter 4) in which I\ud postulate a group of acting readers' multiple 'embodied' poetic discourses -\ud controlled by the same poetic text - inter-acting in a representational\ud 'physical' space to recreate selves, schemata, and iconic contexts.\ud This theory systematically informs the practical part of my research\ud (Chapters 5-9) consisting in 'dialogic' classroom operationalizations of each\ud of the three phases. I pragmatically demonstrate (through protocol analysis)\ud that to be conceptually receptive to poetic language the student/acting-reader\ud needs to be physically prepared to be receptive to it. Stylistics, thus, is\ud meant as the analysis of the acting reader's own responses, not as the\ud analysis of the text (Chapter 5). I first provide 'top-down' affective\ud evidence that the nature of schemata is essentially 'bodily', as the body is\ud the experiential way to conceptualization (Chapter 6). Then, I show\ud students/acting-readers' 'bottom-up' cognitive embodiments of\ud ideational/interpersonal 'voices' in both macro- and micro-communication\ud (Chapter 7), to finally describe groups of acting readers' pragmatic\ud achievements of 'interactive' dramatic embodiments of collective poetic\ud discourses (Chapter 8). I conclude (Chapter 9) by indicating possible\ud theoretical and pedagogic developments of my rationale

Propaganda visualizations of Chinese communist party in posters and magazine covers during 1989-2009

This research-based thesis is to discover the development of visualizations of political ideology and the utilization of visual language in contemporary Chinese propaganda posters and magazine covers during 1989-2009 (including 1989). The chosen set of poster cases contains posters that were published only by the party’s propaganda organs. The set of magazine cover cases contains a Chinese state-level magazine “China Pictorial” aimed for commercial circulation. It can be purchased by every Chinese citizen in book stores in China. In general, the author aims to discover how visual language is applied in political propaganda in two different media and to discover what kind of visual rhetoric is used in contemporary Chinese political propaganda. The author has applied content analysis, semiology and Marja Seliger’s visual rhetoric theory (2008) as research methods to conduct the visual research on 210 visual cases in total including both propaganda posters and covers of “China Pictorial”. Through the visual content analysis, the author finds out that there are three types of visual signs applied in research material. They are “iconic sign”, “indexical sign” and “symbolic sign”. Moreover, the author also discovers that the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda organ has applied different symbolic actions in posters and magazine covers to construct various visual arguments. These visual arguments can be concluded in five reflexive themes. The author finds out that the five themes are ‘China’s modernization’, ‘China’s technological progression and competence’, ‘the excellence of the Chinese Communist Party’, ‘happy Chinese people’ and ‘the glories of the socialist China’. In addition to that, the author discovers “brand rhetoric”, “personalized rhetoric” and “poetic rhetoric” in the five reflexive themes

The Strategy of Structuring Information According to its Relevance in Mind Manipulation

The article deals with the linguistic means of mind manipulation and the strategy of structuring information according to its relevance. The author offers an overall classification of manipulation strategies and tactics and goes on to analyse how the strategy of structuring information according to its relevance is implemented in various communicative situations. The article focuses on giving a detailed analysis of the strategy and linguistic and extra-linguistic means used to manipulate the addressee. The author looks into the theoretical grounds of “the compliment sandwich” along with its practical application in communication, analysing a failed attempt of this act and offering an explanation why the act was unsuccessful. The author also demonstrates how an act of mind manipulation may be successful even after the addressee realises they have been manipulated, offering reasons for such an outcome. Special attention is given to the analysis of mind manipulation act where the target is guided by the manipulator from beginning to end, without realising of being manipulated. The article maintains that a successful manipulation act is based on a variety of techniques as well as the knowledge of the addressee’s personal traits and the dexterity of the manipulator. Verbal means are enforced by non-verbal ones producing the desired effect

Performing translation : theatrical theory and its relevance to textual transfer

The fundamental similarity between translation and acting can be summarized by the words of translator Ralph Manheim: ‘translators are like actors: we speak lines by someone else’ (cited in Stavans 1998: 176). This common metaphor is a useful tool for translation practitioners and researchers. Although it cannot be fully exhausted, it can be further clarified, analysed and developed by looking into modern and pre-modern theories of theatrical performance, examining their compatibility and incompatibility with the world of translation practice and theory. The first chapter of this thesis deals with mimetic representation in translation and in performance. The issue of disguising oneself as someone else while performing or translating raises practical problems. They are discussed here in relation to the opposite approaches to acting suggested by Denis Diderot and Constantin Stanislavski. The following chapter deals with radical goals of theatrical and textual representations, and discusses ethical and political strategies in relation to Bertolt Brecht and Lawrence Venuti. The next chapter deals with spiritual and metaphysical goals of theatrical and textual representations, and discusses them in relation to Jerzi Grotowski and Walter Benjamin. The final chapter explores the common ground between theatrical space and norms of translation, and shows that in many ways, the use of theatrical space, confining performers yet channelling their communication with their spectators, functions in similar fashion to translation norms

Fictive interaction in blended networks in the daily show with Jon Stewart: conceptualizing politican humor discourse not only for entertaining purpouses

[ES] Esta tesis analiza el discurso de Jon Stewart, el anterior presentador del conocidísimo programa satírico de “soft news” estadounidense The Daily Show. Más concretamente, se analiza un fenómeno conceptual que el presentador utilizaba frecuentemente en sus monólogos, basado en el uso de un marco (“frame”) en el que se da la interacción directa cara a cara como patrón organizativo para estructurar la cognición, la interacción ficticia (“fictive interaction”) (Pascual 2002; 2006; 2008a; 2008b; 2014), no solo para informar a su audiencia pero también para criticar y presentar sus propios puntos de vista y opiniones. El objetivo principal fue analizar las redes de interacción ficticia creadas por Stewart, como estrategias retóricas de su discurso, que implicaban mantener conversaciones ficticias con personas “reales”, que no estaban presentes en el estudio y que en realidad no tomaban parte en cualquiera de estas interacciones, diseñadas tan solo para los espectadores. Aunque estos diálogos imaginarios se realicen en una estructura de interacción abierta, es decir, durante los monólogos del presentador, constituyen una comunicación tridireccional, conocida como triálogo ficticio (“fictive trialogue”) (Pascual 2002; 2008b; 2014). Los triálogos ficticios son estructuras conceptuales prototípicas de programas de televisión como The Daily Show, donde el presentador, Jon Stewart, que es el productor ficticio habla con un receptor ficticio para beneficio de los espectadores, los oyentes participativos (“bystanders”) ficticios que están escuchando las conversaciones irreales. Estas interacciones imposibles son producidas no solo para hacer reír el público, sino también con fines retóricos