Expressing Evaluative Attitude in Advertising Reception

Download or read book Expressing Evaluative Attitude in Advertising Reception written by Stella Maris Bullo and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is placed within the context of reception studies and examines spoken data collected via two focus groups. The aim of the study was to uncover attitudinal disposition resulting in evaluation and the socio-cognitive resources assumed to have been triggered by the informants involved in the sense-making process. The study uses three advertisements for high involvement products that recontextualised well- known paintings in various ways. The spoken data was subjected to two stages of analysis. Firstly, a bottom-up textual analysis was carried out applying the APPRAISAL typology. This looked at how evaluation happens in text by identifying lexical items across a range of discourse- semantic categories and allocating them to a specific APPRAISAL category (i.e. AFFECT, APPRECIATION or JUDGMENT). This was followed by a top-down examination of the socio-cognitive resources and processes inferred to underlie those evaluative choices made by the speakers. This was carried out by identifying socio-cognitive representations' (SCRs) present in the data and indexed in discourse by various linguistic features. The approach taken allowed to illustrate that a study of evaluation on its own cannot account for different responses of groups of people within the same target market of the products advertised. The application of such an integrated framework may help uncover the way in which the attitudinal disposition arising from making sense of hybrid advertising texts is actualised in linguistic structures as well as the mechanisms informing the audience's cognition in the sense-making process. The study concludes by discussing how such a typology may have important implications for socio- cognitive discourse analysis as well as for advertising research.