Abstract: Language is humanity’s valuable asset and has continued to lend itself to various communicational functions in all humanity’s quests, encounters and spheres. Advertising, a thriving subset of communication, has constantly evolved alongside humanity and human enterprise and has continued to thrive on the wings of language, which come in handy in performing actual societal functions subsumed in acts. It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the pragmatic dimensions of advertising discourses. Its focus is on the pragmatic acts performed by cosmetics advertisements. It analyses the pragmemes and practs in 10 advertisements got from the website of Tara Cosmetics (www.houseoftara.com), a Nigerian cosmetic brand. The study adopts Jacob Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Act Theory as a working framework. The research also adopts a descriptive qualitative method to analyse data sourced purposively from the wide corpora of cosmetics advertisements on the internet site of the local cosmetic brand. The study reveals using practing, situational setting-up and co-opting that the target audience is influenced by acts performed using texts and visuals. It further indicates that Tara cosmetics advertisements pull out acts which messages are based on social contexts to project practs of advising, counseling, persuading and recommending. This is achievable through the employment of activity-based items of speech act, indirect speech act, facial expression and contextual features of reference, relevance, inference, shared situational and cultural knowledge. The study reveals that advertising discourses do not only dwell on explication as, most often than not, there are implied messages, arrived at through contextual navigation, which cause a change in the scheme of events. It then concludes that as advertisements are replete with pragmatic acts couched in implicature, the capability of drawing deductive inference is key to understanding advertising messages.
Keywords: Pragmatics, Pragmatic Acts, implicature, Pragmeme, Advertising, Cosmetics Advertisements.
Title: PRAGMATIC ACTS IN TARA COSMETICS ADVERTISEMENTS
Author: Chinwe Innocentia Ahumaraeze, Ephraim Chukwu, Prof.
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
Vol. 11, Issue 2, April 2023 - June 2023
Page No: 87-100
Research Publish Journals
Website: www.researchpublish.com
Published Date: 22-April-2023
