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The paper presents a comparative analysis of two audiovisual commercials targeted at mothers. While the Huggies commercial employs the mother identity established in the 20th-century media discourse, the Frida Mom commercial challenges this normative by constructing a more complex identity. The major argument is that stance-taking as a discursive practice enables the persuader to build the intended identity and thus to influence the persuadee’s decision. The paper studies both verbal and non-verbal stance-taking markers employed by the secondary participants, voice-over and superimposed texts. It concludes that the modalities are complementary in the sense that the verbal certainty provided in a faceless style is completed by the visual positive affect and vice versa in case of the Huggies commercial, but in the Frida Mom commercial both verbal and visual modalities communicate either doubt and negative affect simultaneously, or the positive affect. Concerning the stance object, while the Huggies commercial focuses on evaluating the product being advertised and the positive aspect the product brings to the mothering practice, the Frida Mom commercial evaluates the mothering practice in a much broader sense, ranging from the negative affect towards the mental health issues related to breastfeeding up to the positive affect towards maternal love.
Since advertising represents one-way, public communication the message of which is to sell the product being advertised, the persuader's task is to background the persuasive intention of the message in order to mitigate the negative impact of the persuasiveness. Simultaneously, the persuader has to support the persuadee's trust in the product's quality and usefulness. From the point of view of linguistics, this means that the persuader combines features related to formality, impersonality and detachment, with those connected with informality, personality and involvement. In other words, the discourse of advertising mingles elements of writtenness with the elements of spokenness to make the advertising message more acceptable but still credible. The elements can be found on every linguistic level. Advertising communication thus becomes a private, colloquial interaction where the persuader treats the persuadee respectfully as a social equal. The objective of the present paper is to analyze the way the three language entities, the secondary participant, the voice-over and the super, participate in the process of hybridization in TV advertising for products of everyday use.
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