Advertising Communication: Constructing Meaning Potential Through Disjunctive Grammar

Abstract

Communication through language, irrespective of the model of its structure and deployment, entails the making of meanings. Publicity professionals seem to understand that meaning making in communicating the target audience does not need to be either clausal or sentential-dependent. Meaning productions can be pungent with fragmented structures. Thus, the ways that advertising experts produce meaning through disjunctive grammar was the concern of this study. The analysis considered twelve advertisements of beverages and telecommunications for examination to explicate meanings. The Hallidayan ‘below the clause’ was the conceptual facilitator of meanings in texts. The application of technological tools of the table and graph assisted in computing the frequencies of the disjunctive facilities of the texts. The study drew a conclusion that nominal group is the most employed device to fascinate readers to consumption. Having observed that advertisers utilized health matters, beliefs and values, monetary gifts, contents of commodities, globalization, etc. to persuade consumers, the study suggested that advertisements could continue to deploy punctuated structures to reveal the true contents of the advertised products for proper decision making in the products’ patronization. Such behavior of disjunctive deployment could also stimulate the public from being recalcitrant to reading advertising artifacts, as convincing the public, in one way or another, is actually the goal of persuasion in advertising.

Keywords: advertising, below the clause, communication, disjunctive structure, language, meaning derivative