Print advertising: intergenerational transgression

According to Bakhtin, the genres can be understood as "relatively stable types of utterances." Although currently the "genre stability" has been subject for so many scientific investigations, we believe that, in fact, the term "relatively" deserves greater attention. Actually, one can say it is the function of a given genre that will establish its more accurate characterization. Precisely at this point we find there is a possibility of transgression in a given genre. The objective of this work is, therefore, to investigate how to develop the construction of meaning in print advertising, in view of the influence of the genre transgression in this process. For this purpose, we shall consider the concepts of the discursive genre as proposed by Bakhtin (2003 [1979]) and later approached by Marcuschi (2010 [2002]); the notion of established generic conventions proposed by Maingueneau (2004); and finally the idea of intergenre transgression highlighted by Lara (2008) from Bakhtin's carnivalization. The corpus was a piece in print advertising, in which the phenomenon of intergenre transgression was noticed as an essential tool for the construction of meaning in the text. One can affirm that, besides the humanized connotation of the piece on screen, intergenre transgression actually contributes to an argumentative construction of the advertising text, thus constituting an important strategy in this discourse.