Um exame da adjetivação no uso efetivo da língua na prática social do discurso publicitário

Abstract

This dissertation is situated on the area of Critical Discourse Analysis, focusing both on a socio-cognitive perspective and on Social Semiotics, and its theme is the adjectivation processes found in written advertisements published in different magazines. The general purpose is to contribute for studies of Portuguese as it is spoken in Brazil and used in advertising discourse. The specific objectives are: 1. to analyse text organization of advertisements published in Brazilian magazines; 2. to verify which processes of adjectivation occur in advertisements, and what their ideological and cultural implicits are; 3. to search linguistic procedures used in gramaticalization of adjectives present in textual elements, in order to establish a locus of seduction for the reader, a typical feature of advertisements; and 4. to examine strategies of seduction used as arguments, which are responsible for transforming readers into consumers. The hypothesis of this research is that the adjective function in advertisements is to individualize a product that presents similarities to others. In this way, the individualization of a product leads to the establishment of a rhetorical place of seduction for the reader. This happens through processes of adjectival grammaticalization. For the purposes of the present research fifty advertisements were chosen and collected from magazines aimed at both male and female readers. The results show that: 1. advertisements are written according to their specific structure (signature, title, text); 2. adjectives belonging to the language system and others built by processes of adjectival gramaticalization are frequent occurrences. The result of this is the individualization of the advertised product, driven by its position in the market. In this way, textual lexia depends on the culture and the ideology of a given social group; 3.the process of gramaticalization builds compound lexias, complex lexias and textual lexias; 4. the advertisements analysed present necessity, probability and possibility arguments. In this manner, the individualization of a product occurs either with the help of regular adjectives, present in the language system , or through gramaticalization, and it aims at turning the reader into a consumer