A SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF SELECTED ENGLISH-BASED CONSUMER GOODS ADVERTISEMENT MESSAGES IN THE ELECTRONIC MEDIA IN EKITI STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

In the awake of the revolutionary shift in interest by linguists, from language form to language functions, several attempts have been made by scholars to investigate what people are doing whenever they use language, and the basis upon which the meaning of an utterance can transcend the conventional meaning of the words the speaker uses in a given conventional message. The current study is one of such attempts, and seeks essentially to investigate the act contained in the selected consumer goods English-based advertisements in the electronic media using J.R. Searle’s model of Speech Act Theory. The paper analyses six (6) adverts selected from radio and television in Ekiti State. The goal of such analysis is to find out the acts contained in such adverts with the conditions necessary for the successful performance of such acts. The findings revealed that assertive is predominantly used in consumer goods advertisements in electronic media. It also discovered that the hearer or the viewer needs to bring his experience in the world into use before fully internalizing the content of such adverts.