Analysis and Classification of Directions in Written Advertisements

In this paper, we analyse directions or directives, as labelled by Searle, on a corpus of eighty-four written advertisements published in various magazines and newspapers. Based on our findings, we put forward a typology of directions which consists of four more categories and which we believe may be extremely useful in the production or analysis of the speech acts used in written advertisements. The results of the analysis and the suggested typology can be of interest to both advertisers (senders), in that they may use these specific sub-classes of speech acts to achieve the intended effect on their audience, and to analysts or customers (receivers), who will thus grow more aware of the strategies used by the senders to influence their choices.