Étude sociolinguistique du discours d’affiches publicitaires des événements chrétiens à l’université de Cape Coast

Abstract

This study aims at examining the discourse elements in posters used to advertise christian events at UCC and how they influence selected students to attend events advertised. The discourse elements were used to prepare questionnaires for sampled students. The data was collected at the Students’ Reference Section of the Main Library using accidental and purposive sampling methods. In all, data were collected from 144 respondents and were analyzed based on the Communicative theory of Roman Jakobson and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The analysis of the data revealed that the contents of the posters influenced the sampled students to attend the events. This is due to the fact that the contents of the posters evoke certain needs of the some students and equally generated curiosity in others. We recommended that advertisers study the needs of the students and evoke them in the advertisements. We also found out that the sampled students were persuaded to attend the events by all the discourse elements in the posters but to a large extent the titles and themes persuaded the majority. We attribute this to the fact that the titles and the themes constitute an explicit summary of the events. Again, the respondents were familiar with the discourse elements in their sociocultural context. Based on this, we recommended that advertisers use discourse elements that are known and understood by the public.