Visuals as Effective Extralinguistic Feature of Language of Television Advertisement

Abstract

Television is one of the oldest medium of mass communication and one of the media of advertisement through which information is passed to the people with the aim of affecting their decision on the product being advertised. The ability of television advertisement to convey the desired message to the audience effectively and convincingly may, however, be hindered if the limited time permitted on advertisement belt where linguistic feature, which is fleeting in nature, is used with few or no extralinguistics. The implication of this is that the message conveyed is soon lost with the fleeting words and expressions used in the advertisement. The audio-visual advantage of television that permits the combination of visual and linguistic elements in advertisement copy makes television advertisement a more effective medium of influencing consumers’ attitude to products. It is, however, noted that most of the works on advertisements do not pay adequate attention to these visual elements as factors that contribute to the effectiveness of advertisement, especially on television.The objective of this work, therefore, is to identify visuals such as dramatization, pictorials, display, facial expression, etc., as effective visual elements used in television advertisements, determine their frequency of occurrence, and identify how effective their usage is on the audience.

Keywords: Advertisement, Commercials, Communication, Effects, Extralinguistics, Linguistics, Television, Stylistics.