E-advertising: Strategic Selection of Structural Forms and Their Communicative Functions.
E-ADVERTISING: STRATEGIC SELECTION OF STRUCTURAL FORMS AND THEIR COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS

Summary/Abstract: E-advertising messages must perform at least their basic functions of catching the attention and inciting to action under spatial and temporal constraints of a cluttered medium. In order to meet these desiderata we hypothesize the advertisers’ strategic selection of structural forms that effect persuasion based on response-seeking speech acts in a randomized analysis of 60 first page ads appearing on Yahoo mail in the period November 2002 and July 2005. E-advertising is a hybrid medium that evinces similarities with other advertising media in its distribution of linguistic parameters but also idiosyncrasies. In e-advertising noun groups are downgraded from their leading position in the advertising condominium, in favor of imperatives, with the immediate impact of scoring an all time high saliency of directive speech acts. This linguistic constituency translates into a frank and explicit persuasion that assigns eadvertising to bald on the record politeness and associates it with the hard sell approach. Since e-advertising functions in an international context that precludes cultural adaptation, this bias can be perceived as intruding and offensive for high-context cultures

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