Advertising to Canada's official language groups: A comparative critical discourse analysis

Julia Therese Kuhn, Erhard Lick

Publication: Scientific journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Abstract
Two advertisements for Coffee-mate were selected from a large corpus of advertisements to conduct a qualitative analysis. We analyzed the different approaches used to address the anglophone and francophone language group considering both the visual and verbal text (Coffee-mate constitutes a representative example of the entire corpus). We concluded that the English advertisement shows characteristics of a hard sell ad while the French advertisement contains elements of a soft sell ad. Moreover, whereas the English advertisement uses more imperatives, stresses performance, and addresses the reader personally, the French advertisement has more interrogatives, is more passion-oriented, and only implicitly demands the reader to act.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)165 - 176
JournalSemiotica
Volume176
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2009

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