A LINGUISTIC STUDY OF MANIPULATIVE ADVERTISING STRATEGIES OF THE MOBILE NETWORK OPERATORS IN EGYPT AND THE UNITED STATES. COMPARATIVE APPROACH.

Abstract

Advertising nowadays penetrates all aspects of our daily life: on TV, the radio, in the newspapers, in the mailboxes, on the side of underground metro, etc. Whether advertising is annoying or amusing, useful or misleading, it is a form of communication whereby advertisers communicate the value of a product or service to customers. However, advertising is far from just being informative in an innocent and straightforward way. Advertising has an agenda. It is a skillfully constructed message, which manipulates the viewers’ culturally created perceptions and aspirations, and which presents the advertised product as a way to satisfy the audience’s desires. This happens by creating a specific image for the advertised stuff and building the viewers’ perception of such ads. Advertising is also about establishing a relationship between the advertiser and the viewer and it is important to look at this relationship as it helps to form the consumers’ behavior towards the advertised product. Academic contributions on the linguistic features of advertising appeared few decades and developed into a rich interdisciplinary field of study. Advertising has attracted consistent and intense attention across academic disciplines including marketing, media studies, psychology, sociology, and linguistics. From a linguistic dimension, advertising research focused heavily on the description of specific textual devices or the relations between text and image, and certain pragmatic features, which view advertising as a special concept of discourse. In this sense some important questions remain unapproached, like, how are the addressees motivated to tackle and process linguistic notions in advertising and what are the strategies to manipulate their mental concepts.