| dc.description.abstract | This paper presents the results of a linguistic study on the advertising language in
Kenya. While leaning towards stylistics, the study follows the framework of
Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Mainly we were out to discover
how advertising language realizes its persuasive intention. This as we hypothesize
is possible, by the many choices available within the interpersonal function of
language (style). Out of such a study, we reasoned, it was possible to identify
stylistic features that we could classify and generalize to the advertising language
In Kenya. Towards that goal data IS collected that markets the
Telecommunication Industry' from the leading newspapers in Kenya. The results
show that the advertisers choose variously from the ranks of word, group and
clause and through systems like mood, attitude, person, comment, lexical register,
they are able to assign various interpersonal roles to the reader (and themselves).
The major functions realized by the adverts analyzed in this study includes
informing, persuading and reminding the readers / consumers about the
advertisers' goods and services on offer. The paper concludes that SFG is an
important tool for analyzing such complex register because it recognizes the
systematic relationship between the social environment and the functional
organization of language (cf Halliday, 1985: 11).
General guide to analysis and abbreviations
The companies represented here include the following, whose first initial letters
are the ones featuring in the main text
Company! Advertiser As represented in text.
Safaricom - S
Kencell - K
Telkom (K) - T
Cellucom (For Samsung) -C
Noba -N
Motorola -M
In longer texts we supply the newspaper and the dates of appearance:
Newspapers Abbreviation
Daily Nation DN
Saturday Nation StN
Sunday Nation SN
East African Standard EAS
East African Sunday Standard EASS
A typical example in such a reference taking into account the advertiser, paper and
date would look like: Where we lead others follow (DN,1I2!03)
Safaricom Corpus Newspaper date
We have also underlined the key words or phrases of the text that we analyze at a given point.
Others
SFG
SFL
Systemic Functional Grammar
Systemic Functional Linguistics | en |
