Hypothesis and deduction in the studies of the discourse of advertising

Abstract: The paper is an attempt to show that a discourse type can in itself be an analytic determinant, i.e. that it can effectively dictate methods of investigating it. This claim is illustrated by a study of the discourse of advertising, or rather, of how the discourse of advertising motivates an analyst to adopt a specific track of analysis. In the paper, the discourse of advertising is shown to possess certain properties which favor a deduction- based approach to analysis, whereby an analyst is likely to postulate about a given text’s function a priori, that is before an inquiry into particular samples of textual data takes place. This approach may lead to a number of analytic fallacies such as, for instance, underspecification of data supporting the thesis or illustration of thesis with atypical or even irrelevant data.