Genre Analysis of Promotional Text Messages

Abstract

The virtual world, with its many ways of communication, illustrates the most visible way in which communicative behavior has altered. These new modalities offer a robust testing ground for language theories, including genre studies. Mobile technology in general and in particular SMS, has brought with it its own culture and language as has every other media. SMS is an asynchronous, text-based, electronically mediated interaction with a single channel. It represents the unpredictability and unconstrained nature of contemporary communication technology, which is evolving at breakneck pace. The aim of this study was to analyze the SMS sent by three companies providing goods and services. It included promotional SMSs of banks, clothing brands and transport services. Bhatia’s (2005) Model was applied to see how this promotional genre conforms to the 10 moves given in the model. 15 SMSs from each category were selected. On the second level, their linguistic features were also studied to observe how tense, lexical choice and
formality levels changed from one category to another. It was concluded that SMS being a new, brief and purely text-based promotional genre did not have all the 10 moves of Bhatia’s Model. The study shows that being a very brief, textual and electronically mediated genre, SMS has its own genre structure which leaves out some moves from Bhatia Model that is applicable to multi-modal promotional genres.