Discourse Analysis: Politeness Strategy in Body and Facial Advertisements

Discourse Analysis: Politeness Strategy in Body and Facial Advertisements
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Discourse Analysis: Politeness Strategy in Body and Facial Advertisements
Body and face advertisements are becoming more popular across all industries. These ads are characterized by attractive, persuasive messages and images that allure consumers towards specific products. Linguistic politeness plays a crucial role in helping these firms achieve the objectives mentioned above. Their strategies are equally more effective in maintaining social equilibrium and fostering rapport with consumers. Individuals who encounter polite linguistic aspects are more likely to be attentive to the polite language. Therefore, maintaining a sustainable emotional and social relationship with customers makes politeness crucial to the development of effective body and facial advertisements. Overall, identifying the most effective politeness strategies in body and facial advertisements and how they are employed to stimulate consumer desires forms the core of this study.
Literature Review
The topic of politeness theories is among the most popular areas of literature focus. Issa (2017) identifies an echo of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory and acknowledges that it resonates more with most studies on this field. The model aims at accounting for the politeness phenomenon and its extraordinary parallelism portrayed through linguistic minutiae utterances. The latter helps unearth the underlying communication modes that are standard or universal across all human interactions, reflecting the inferences and assumptions made in speech planning. The primary strength of this study is its focus on the cultural impact of the above theory on consumer's perceptions about specific products. Whereas the literature explores the view from a print media perspective, the above factor applies to the body and facial advertisements.

The researcher uses various popularity statistics to justify why some platforms yield better politeness strategy outcomes than others. For example, the author posits that 3% of people listen to the radio, 11% read magazines, 9% watch TV, while 70% of the world population read newspapers, making the former more popular (Chen, 2008). It, therefore, doubles that there should be more focus on politeness advertisement strategies based on the above statistics. The number of hours spent on these platforms has also been cited among the primary determinants of their effectiveness for politeness strategy application. According to Chen (2008), people spend an average of 3.6 hours watching TV, 0.9 hours reading newspapers, 1.47 hours listening to the radio, and 0.6 hours reading magazines. These statistics can therefore be used in prioritizing the politeness strategy advertisement platform.
The study has also identified a significant number of research gaps which are also among its greatest strengths. In an ideal situation, research should focus on their research questions, identify areas that have failed to address and recommend further future studies. Among the research gaps identified herein is the failure by existing literature to explicitly provide detailed information on politeness advertisement speech linguis...