Communicating Beyond the Conventional Functions: An Assessment of Newspaper Announcements
Journal Title: Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies - Year 2015, Vol 5, Issue 2
Abstract
By default, all announcements notify listeners or readers of a given event, be it social, cultural, or religious. Newspaper personal or non-product advertisements tend to make audiences focus on its sponsors or the subject-matter of the announcements. Most personal announcements fall within the homely discourse genre. Scholars believe that careful examination of these types of announcements reveals further communications achieved beyond its primary functions and literal wordings. These communications could be within sociocultural or religious contexts. This critique reviews scholarly literature on how language is employed in a variety of newspaper announcements to convey much deeper sociocultural, religious, or political messages. The review focuses two types of genres, viz: congratulatory, and obituary and death announcements. Findings reveal that in congratulation and thank-you messages, a higher level of communication is achieved through various segments of such announcements, i.e. the use of multimodal, its position in the newspaper, etc. It shows how the announcements serve certain communicative purposes and how they are being influenced by factors such as gender and socioeconomic class. On the other hand, the literature reviewed on obituary and death announcements discloses how language is being utilized in the advent of death to communicate, not only to the deceased, but with wider audiences. The appraisal demonstrates how pages of newspaper death notice become platforms for eradicating social divisions and fighting the privileged groups. Another part of the evaluation discusses some contrasting conflicting views on the question of invoking God and religion in death rituals. As deceased persons are being celebrated and seen as martyrs in given cultures, others subscribe to notions that perceive death as personal choice and mere departure from the world. It is therefore recommended that more empirical works be conducted on congratulatory and other happy ceremony category of the newspaper announcements as the literature reviewed, so far, shows a very few scholarly works in that aspect of the genre.
Authors and Affiliations
Tanimu Ahmed Jibril| Universiti Putra, Malaysia, Afida Mohamad Ali| Universiti Putra, Malaysia, ZalinaMohdKasim| Universiti Putra, Malaysia, Chan Mei Yuit| Universiti Putra, Malaysia
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP10028
- DOI -
- Views 348
- Downloads 16
Media Preferences and Perceptions: The Case of Bahir Dar University Instructors
The main intent of this study is to empirically examine media preferences and perceptions of instructors at Bahir Dar University (BDU) in selected Faculties, Colleges and School. The survey method of research was emplo...
Bestsellers beyond Bestsellers: The Success of a Good Story
This article examines the recent trend of books and book series gaining popularity with unprecedented speed. By closely examining the release and success of The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series, early publicat...
The Relation between Positive Brand Emotions and Recall
Brand memory and ad memory is a kind of mental storage that consumers apply to while making decisions about brands and buying. A positive ad memory for a given brand plays an effective role for consumers to develop a p...
The Possibility of a Transnational Public Sphere & New Cosmopolitanism within the Networked Times: Understanding a Digital Global Utopia: “Avaaz.org†and a Global Media Event: “Freedom Flotillaâ€
The 19th and 20th centuries have been structured with full of struggles to reshape and define a new state model. Each territory fought for specifying its own dimensions, rules and regulations, values and certain ways of...
The Degree of Dependence on International Reporting in Macedonian Internet Media from Global News Agencies
The paper tries to research again some of the conclusions of the MacBride report „Many Voices, One World“ implemented and published from UNESCO in1980, with particular review on present situation in Macedonian new m...