'Advertorials': A genre-based analysis of an emerging hybridized genre

Genre analysis has been applied to a sizable body of linguistic studies on various text types. However, little attention has been paid to advertorials as an emerging hybridized genre. To identify the generic and linguistic characteristics of advertorials, and therefore to classify advertorials into an appropriate genre, this study carries out a comprehensive genre analysis of advertorials based on Bhatia's (1993) seven-step genre analysis methodology. A corpus of 55 advertorials was collected from four English-language magazines and two English-language newspapers, from which a sub-corpus of 12 samples was further selected for a thorough examination of linguistic characteristics. Attempting to gain a comprehensive view of generic features of advertorials, this study makes a critical comparison of advertorials with three inextricably related genres: advertisements, news stories and editorials. Linguistic evidence sufficiently demonstrates that advertorials share fundamental generic and linguistic natures with advertisements and proposes classifying advertorials as a sub-genre of advertisements.