Stylistic Elements in Egyptian Ramadan TV Commercials: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Document Type : Research in linguistic and literary studies

Author

Languages Department, College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science & Technology, Alexandria, Egypt

Abstract

With the advent of the Information Age, language is no longer the only means of constructing meaning. A variety of semiotic modes and social symbols such as images, gestures, and music are involved in the process of meaning creation and construction. The present study investigates a number of linguistic and stylistic elements in Egyptian Ramadan commercials. For this purpose, TV commercials broadcasted on Egyptian TV channels in 2022 were examined in a content analysis. A total of thirteen TV commercials were analysed after discarding other TV commercials with low shares on social media. The qualitative textual analysis was conducted to investigate the effectiness of the choice of words with a triangulation of a number of theoretical frameworks as well as analytical tools in such disciplines as social semiotics, stylistics and multimodality. The visual semiotic approach proposed by Kress and Leeuwen (1996) as well as Halliday (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar have been applied on the selected commercials. There is a number of stylistic elements which are frequently used in the commercials such as lexis, code-switching, and repetition. Findings showed that social semiotic modes are powerful tools in addressing the three meta-functions of the language used in the commercials. They also demonstrated that combining text and image contributes not only to the increasing ratings and shares of such television commercials, but also the growing importance of such stylistic elements in TV advertising as they help attract viewers to the advertised products and services.

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