Pragmatics of Philippine print advertising discourse

This study examines the linguistic realization of persuasion in Philippine print ads and the macrostructure of these ads as well. It likewise describes persuasion in the print ads as a macro-speech act. The corpus of the body consists of sixty ads published in three leading Philippine broadsheets, namely, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, and Manila Bulletin. The data were collected from the Wednesday and Sunday issues of the same newspapers over a period of four weeks, from April 18 to May 12, 1999.The study shows that there are syntactic and lexical features that define the discourse function of persuasion in Philippine print ads. Among these are their tendency to use sentence fragments and simple sentences (without embedding), imperatives, the second-person pronominal you, and active structures, as well as their propensity for attitudinal adjectives, neologisms, and intra-sentential codeswitching. With regard to the macrostructure of the ads, visuals and the signature line are indispensable, while the headline and the body copy are the obligatory elements. The last verbal element - standing details - is optional. In terms of describing persuasion as a macro-speech act, the representative-directive pattern is the predominant speech act sequence in the ads. Finally, the utterances in the ads are connected to one another by cohesion devices such as repetition, reference, conjunction, ellipsis/substitution, and synonymy.In the light of the above findings, the study proposes a pragmatic model of persuasion in Philippine print advertising. The model suggests a complex interaction between two variables: text and context