An Eco-linguistic Account of Press Real Estate Advertisements in Egypt

Abstract

Advertising is an act of communication where readers are driven into             a certain reaction mainly to the profit of the advertisers. Recently, research has witnessed an increase in demand to highlight the way language and ecology can be applied to over-lapping concerns; this has paved the way for research into eco-linguistics (a challenge to the 20th century linguistics). Hence, the present paper focuses on the analysis of real estate advertisements as shown in print media. Data is based on real estate advertisements displayed in two Egyptian newspapers: Al-Waseet “The medium”, a free weekly advertising newspaper, and Al-Ahraam “The Pyramids”, the most popular local newspaper in Egypt. The study carries out a linguistic analysis of these advertisements and their close relation to the eco system in Egypt. The theoretical framework within which this study is conducted is based on Halliday (1990), Weinrich (1990), fill (1998), and Armstrong (2010). A corpus of 39 advertisements was collected over a one month period starting from Friday the 6th of April, 2018 to Friday the 27th of April, 2018. The study aims to find out the prominent elements in these advertisements and how the ecological variation in Egypt induces a variation of linguistic patterns of real estate advertisements. The main focus is on investigating the ecological contexts in which these advertisements are embedded. The paper is divided as follows: section (1) introduces the topic; section (2) reviews some relevant literature on the language of advertising; section (3) discusses the main approaches of eco-linguistics. Data is described and analyzed in section (4) and section (5) sums up the main results and recommendation of the study.