| dc.description.abstract | This study is an analysis of the difference between Gikuyu and English advertising discourse. The argument of the study is based on some notions of Relevance theory namely explicatures and implicatures. The study will also examine other key notions of relevance theory that are related to advertising discourse. The study has used three different types of advertising media namely: radio, television and print. Samples of advertisements in both Gikuyu and English will be analyzed with a view to identifying the explicatures and implicatures in each sample as well as determining whether relevance theory can be used to analyze of the discourse of advertising.
The texts studied indicate that both Gikuyu and English use explicatures and implicatures in advertising discourse, however, Gikuyu prefers to use implicatures while English prefers to use explicatures. The explicatures in the study are derived from reference assignment, disambiguation, ellipsis as well as semantically incomplete propositional forms. Implicatures on the other hand are derived from proverbs or metaphors, use of euphemisms, rhetorical questions and connotations of words.
The study also reveals that advertisers must learn their audience's way of thinking as well as other factors that motivate them, in relevance theoretic terms, an advertiser and his t~rget audience must have a mutual cognitive environment in order to achieve optimal relevance. The study is divided into five sections. The first section is devoted to a presentation of Relevance theory, advertising discourse and Hall's view of High context culture and Low context culture. The second chapter focuses on the applicability of Relevance Theory to advertising discourse. Chapter three deals with presentation of the data from both English and Gikuyu .Chapter four gives a comprehensive analysis of the data and the last chapter has the conclusion and recommendations. | en_US |
