The meaning constitution in advertising speech from the perspective of the argumentative semantics

Abstract

This paper analyzes the constitution of meaning in the publicity genre, discussing it through Argumentative Semantics. For this, we have checked different advertising texts from distinct periods in light of the Theory of Semantic Blocks. The selection of the material was based on the criterion of working with advertisements from the 1960s and 2012/13. The advertisements were taken on the internet, with the purpose of linguistically relating and discussing advertising pairs of products such as cigarettes, alcoholic beverages and automobiles. We also explore the importance of the image in the ads, discussing its value from the reading of Toldo (2002) on the semiotics of Peirce (2000). Carel and Ducrot (2005) ground the central theory of this research. The results show that despite the equivalence in product selection, the meaning obtained by the constituting linguistic relations of the statements is not the same, because the specificity and the purpose of each advertising are different. In addition, according to the theoretical assumptions used, the image was shown to be complementary to the verb discourse, since the meaning of the advertisement is indicated by the linguistic one.