A Discourse Analysis Of Fast Food Advertisements In English

Abstract

This study aims at conducting a discourse analysis of fast food advertisements in English. The data for analysis in the thesis are 100 samples in English collected from websites of companies manufacturing fast food in the United States, The United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, Canada (English).The study is carried out based on the theories of discourse analysis and a combination of a variety of methods such as descriptive and analytic. The study focuses on analyzing typical discourse features in fast food advertisements in English in terms of layouts, lexical choices, syntactic features and stylistic devices. The findings show that English fast food advertisements display a general layout with four parts: headline, body copy, illustration and slogan. Lexical choices show weasel words, evaluative adjectives and modal verbs used in fast food advertisements. With regard to syntactic features, imperative sentences, simple sentences and ellipsis in declarative sentences are used in fast food advertisements. Finally, stylistic analysis reveals rhyme, repetition and parallelism which are the prominent devices used in English fast food advertisements. Based on the findings, the thesis presented some implications and suggestions for teaching in English. This paper is significant in providing some linguistic and pedagogical contributions, especially for those who work for fast food in promoting their trade name as well as their products. It is hoped that the results of the thesis are useful for those who are interested in fast food advertisements.