Page 368 - Gabrijela Kišiček and Igor Ž. Žagar (eds.), What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and argumentative perspectives, Digital Library, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana 2013
P. 368
What Do We Know about the World?
the you stands for a group of people. On the other hand, the you may stand
for an individual out there who is in the market for a color printer. The point
is that the audience for most ads is not as easily definable as is the audience,
for instance, for a nomination speech at a national political convention. We
just sense that there is somebody out there – preferably thousands of peo-
ple – that the ad-writer wants to persuade to buy something. (Corbett and
Connors, 1999: 3)
These difficulties usually emerge when the communicative action of
advertising is described according to basic functional models of com-
munication, such as (as it is the case in Corbett and Connors, 1999) the
communication triangle (Figure 1), derived from Kinneavy (1969: 302,
1971) and referring to Bühler’s and Jakobson’s models of communica-
tion:1
Figure 1: Kinneavy’s (1969: 302) communication triangle
These models are code-centered, focused on a process of coding and
decoding (Rigotti and Greco, 2006; Rigotti and Rocci, 2006: 163), and
1 Kinneavy (1969: 301) is mainly concerned with composition and the classification of aims of dis-
course and shows that a discourse can focus on either the encoder (expressive function), the decod-
er (persuasive function), the reality (referential function), or the signal (literary function). Jakobson’s
well-known model has a very similar perspective; he extends the number of functions a text may
have distinguishing one function for each element constituting the communicative process. Sim-
ilarities are evident also in respect to Bühler’s (1934) communication model: the signal is placed in
the middle of a triangle and it establishes relations with a sender, a receiver, and an object. Kinneavy
himself acknowledges the strong similarity to Jakobson’s and Bühler’s models, which, he declares, he
discovered after his elaboration of the communication triangle (1969: 301).
the you stands for a group of people. On the other hand, the you may stand
for an individual out there who is in the market for a color printer. The point
is that the audience for most ads is not as easily definable as is the audience,
for instance, for a nomination speech at a national political convention. We
just sense that there is somebody out there – preferably thousands of peo-
ple – that the ad-writer wants to persuade to buy something. (Corbett and
Connors, 1999: 3)
These difficulties usually emerge when the communicative action of
advertising is described according to basic functional models of com-
munication, such as (as it is the case in Corbett and Connors, 1999) the
communication triangle (Figure 1), derived from Kinneavy (1969: 302,
1971) and referring to Bühler’s and Jakobson’s models of communica-
tion:1
Figure 1: Kinneavy’s (1969: 302) communication triangle
These models are code-centered, focused on a process of coding and
decoding (Rigotti and Greco, 2006; Rigotti and Rocci, 2006: 163), and
1 Kinneavy (1969: 301) is mainly concerned with composition and the classification of aims of dis-
course and shows that a discourse can focus on either the encoder (expressive function), the decod-
er (persuasive function), the reality (referential function), or the signal (literary function). Jakobson’s
well-known model has a very similar perspective; he extends the number of functions a text may
have distinguishing one function for each element constituting the communicative process. Sim-
ilarities are evident also in respect to Bühler’s (1934) communication model: the signal is placed in
the middle of a triangle and it establishes relations with a sender, a receiver, and an object. Kinneavy
himself acknowledges the strong similarity to Jakobson’s and Bühler’s models, which, he declares, he
discovered after his elaboration of the communication triangle (1969: 301).
