Of Englishes and Styles: Rhetorical and Semiotic Analysis of Advertisements

Of Englishes and Styles is a sociolinguistic investigation of why and how the advertising discourse and the English language are going increasingly global in the age of social media networks and electronic reproduction. Accordingly, tools from the rhetorical and semiotic scholarly traditions are integrated to examine the discursive mechanisms and the signifying structures of advertisements within this developing landscape. In particular, the book focuses on the notion of style, here intended as the outcome of social modeling, so as to question the ideological distortion whereby an hegemonic means of social standardization like advertising has been disguised into a means of identity styling. Finally, a case study takes into consideration the crucial and yet weak position of today's news media within western democracies, pointing out how the 'advertising' attitude is styled into discursive practices which affect our projections and overall knowledge of the world we live in.