engleski

Personal Names in Advertising Discourse: Comparison of Two Periods

Omnipresence of advertisements, constant differentiation of advertising strategies and their powerful impact on everyday life, system of values and fashions of human thinking gave the strong impetus to their research in the field of linguistics and discourse studies, semiotics and social semiotics, as well as multimodal analysis and visual studies. And yet, personal names are relatively rarely subjected to the comprehensive analysis and interpretations. For that very reason in this proposal we focus on the link between different advertising components (headline, bodycopy, visual, baseline, packshot) and personal names. We aim to compare similarities and differences in the roles and functions of personal names in advertising texts in two chosen periods: at the beginning of appearance of printed advertisements in newspapers (second half of the 19th century) and at the present time. We explore advertising components (Volli 2003) and advertising strategies (Marrone 2007) focused on the product and sender in which personal names may occur. We research the nature of relation between personal names and visual components of advertising texts (Pezzini 2008), as well as their embodiment in multimodal advertising texts (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, Kress 2010). In contrastive analysis of the two periods in question we aim to abstract similarities and differences in the roles and functions of personal names. They will be then interpreted according to historical and social context in periods compared. It will be shown that at the beginning period fundamental function of personal names was to inform and to assure the efficiency of the promoted product. Today these functions are secondary, while the most important functions are associative connections and connotations which evoke cultural knowledge, stereotypes and frames in which promoted product is embedded.

advertising; personal names; semiotics

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