Inferences in advertising : A study of Swedish and Russian TV commercials

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the role of inferences in advertising discourse. Based on the study of conversational implicatures by Grice (1975), and the distinction between ostensive and covert communication elaborated by Sperber and Wilson (1986), a typology of inferences in advertising is proposed. Furthermore, this typology was applied to a corpus of Russian and Swedish TV commercials. The main findings are a broad similarity between the commercials in Sweden and Russia with respect to the proposed inference types, showing certain general characteristics of advertising discourse. However, on closer inspection, qualitative differences between certain types of inferences were found that could be related to cultural and historical differences.