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The Discourse of Advertising

Guy Cook

1st edition 1992

2nd edition 2001

272 pages

Complementary Texts

Roland Barthes

Keywords

Advertising

Theory

Semiotics and Grammars


Cook draws heavily on the works of others (e.g., Williamson, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Baktin, Saussure, Peirce. Lakoff etc.) in order to arise with a theory of Advertising Discourse. He draws liberally upon semiotical, linguistic and rhetorical models in order to do so.

He works from the bottom up describing the material, text and people involved with advertising. There are certain terms upon which he builds:

v      Substance – the physical material used to carry and relay text

v      Music and pictures

v      Paralanguage – meaningful behaviour accompanying language (e.g., facial expression, letter size, table arrangement)

v      Situation – properties and relations of objects in the vicinity of a text

v      co-text – text preceding or following which belongs in the same realm of discourse

v      Intertext – associated text belonging to a different realm of discourse

v      Participants – senders, receivers, addressers and addressees

v      Function – what the text is intended to do by the participants

Cook also introduces his notion of Modes: Music, Pictures and Language. He then goes on to discuss the intermingling of submodes in ads. Examples of submodes are: songs, speeches and writing.