Stylistic Analysis of Pakistani Television Advertisements

Abstract

Stylistics is an integral part of the meaning of the message being conveyed through advertisements that help in the better understanding of these commercials. Keeping this in mind, this thesis aimed to present a stylistic analysis of advertisements, specifically by separating verbal and non-verbal content from adverts aired on television. Stylistics is a branch of linguistic that studies the usage of different elements of linguistics and emotions in a communication message. Advertisement is a form of communication that is used for the persuasion purposes. The application of linguistic and stylistic pattern in order to find out the stylistic characteristics generally used in advertisements will help readers better comprehend the embedded meaning in content of advertisements and how different texts in advertisements affect consumers. By analyzing stylistics, we can better interpret the hidden meaning and the effectiveness of these advertisements. A detailed literature review has been done introducing advertising, its history and language, stylistics and its levels and content analysis of advertisements from the stylistic aspects. In this study, eight television advertisements belonging to the category of Food and Drinks were analyzed on the basis of four stylistic devices which are literary devices, rhetorical devices, sound techniques and non-verbal communication. By using stylistics, the use of capitalization, shape of text, puns and morphology used and repetition of emphasis in an advertisement was analyzed.