Proverbs and advertising: discursive paths of meaning

Abstract

This article aims at analyzing how the meanings of proverbial statements in advertising texts are constituted. In order to base it, we articulate Maingueneau’s enunciative-discursive theory and the dialogical perspective of language proposed by Bakhtin, which allow both to describe the facts of the language verified in the discourse strand of advertising texts and to understand the effects of meaning produced by the intersection of interdiscourse through the work of memory. Furthermore, considering the fact that, according to the Discourse Analysis, the processes which constitute language are historical-socially founded and, according to Orlandi (1999), speech is a “meaning effect among interlocutors”, we find that, despite being considered typical of orality and originated from popular culture, proverbial statements are widely used by the written advertising media, which targets a literate audience, seen as a potential consumer. Our analyzes show that the proverbs, subverted or not in their original sense and in their linguistic materiality, participate as discursive strategies of persuasion, as the authority of the voice of the people, via printed media. Thus, the reiteration of these statements, which represent a stabilized archive, enables the uses of other meanings, although the enunciating subject maintains the illusion of being the origin of the saying.