A pragmatics theory on television advertising

This paper aims to articulate a pragmatics theory of TV advertising. It elaborates the distinction established by the advertiser Bernstein (1974) and the linguist Simpson (2001) between reason and tickle advertising. In order to accomplish this endeavor, we distinguish what type of information is used and how it is handled through the discourse of the advertisement. Therefore, the basic constituents of two types of commercial message will be described. This will allow us to predict their disposition taking into account the rhetorical strategy chosen by the advertiser. Once we have defined both prototypes and the peripheries between them, using the empirical data from our corpus, we will be able to make a calculation of which of these categories were predominant at peak viewing time on the television channels that broadcast openly in Mexico in April 2007. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.