Abd El-Basit A. H. Mahmoud
Abstract:
The discourse analysis of advertisements is increasingly growing in many cultures. Yet few studies have attempted to analyse such discourse in the Arab culture. This study attempts to explore how cultural values manifest in the TV commercials (TVCs) of Arab mobile telecommunication companies and to investigate the linguistic feature as well as discursive and social practices of these commercials in different Arab divisions. To achieve this, 43 TVCs were downloaded from the YouTube channels of Arab mobile telecommunication services during the Ramadan month 1439 AH (17 May–15 June 2018) and were analysed. A qualitative analysis of representative TVCs from each of the four main cultural-geographical divisions was conducted using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) model (1992). The main findings show that most of the commercials used an emotional strategy; employed collectivism, enjoyment, modernity and courtesy values, and utilised appropriate linguistic features as well as discursive and social techniques to attract the target audience.
Keywords: Content analysis, CDA, inter-cultural, cross-cultural, Arab commercials, TVCs, mobile telecommunication companies