Public Information Messages: A Contrastive Genre Analysis of State-Citizen Communication

Research output: Books and anthologiesMonographsResearch

Authors

Public information messages are an important means of state-citizen communication in today’s societies. Using this genre, citizens are directed to “never ever drink and drive”, to “slow down” and to “learn to say no”. Yet, this book presents the first in-depth analysis of public information messages from a linguistic perspective, and indeed also from a cross-cultural perspective. Specifically, the study, adopting genre analysis, contrasts a corpus of state-run national public information campaigns in Germany and Ireland. A taxonomy of moves is developed inductively and the interactional features of the genre are analysed and related to the context of use. The comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, the in-depth analysis and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to researchers and students in (contrastive) discourse analysis, (cross-cultural) pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, advertising, social psychology, mass communication and media studies. Copy-writers will also profit from the insights gained, particularly within the context of an increase in Europe-wide public information campaigns.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationAmsterdem/Philadelphia
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Number of pages356
ISBN (Print)978-9027256270
ISBN (Electronic)9789027273406
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Publication series

NamePragmatics & Beyond New Series
No.222

    Research areas

  • English - Germany, Ireland, Linguistics

DOI