An Analysis of Speech Acts in Bangladeshi Beverage Advertisements and their Impacts on the Attitudes of Youth

Abstract

The language of Advertisements has always been an appealing topic of research by various linguists around the world for their informal structure. This paper analyses adverts of beverages in Bangladesh under the speech act theory which is applied to grab the attention of the consumers. The research will discuss the pragmatics of the adverts in the context of language in action showing the analysis of meanings in order to focus on the persuading strategies being enhanced using speech acts. Previous related studies on advertisements focused on the speech act theories (see Chiluwa, 2007; Windaryati, 2009) while Thinchan (2019) also mentioned linguistic strategies and business ideologies. The theoretical framework for the study is constructed with the Speech Act Theory of Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Yule (1996) as the paper intends to interpret the language of the adverts in terms of persuasive techniques which is a common phenomenon of marketing communication. The primary data for this research includes five selected adverts of the beverages which were updated from2016 to 2021. Qualitative content research was conducted in order to analyze the adverts. In addition, 10 participants of different private universities in Dhaka city of age 18 to 30 were selected for individual interviews in order to identify the impacts on their attitude towards the advertisement.