The article examines the genesis and modification of IT consumer’s identity (ITCI) in terms of certain pragmatic properties of Apple’s slogans. Drawing on Barthes’s concept of mythologization, underpinned by theories of personal archetypes and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the study identified ITCI-descriptors – stylistically and pragmatically connotated meanings, associated with the advertised product or customer characteristics, related to ITCI formation. Initial ITCI construction relies on cognitive needs and the Explore archetype, based on customer-associated descriptor “creativeness”, marked by disregard for cooperative maxims, by oxymorons, allusions, puns and aposiopesis, iconically reproducing nonstandard thinking. Subsequent stages involve the Seeker archetype hybridization with the Trickster archetype, related to ludic stylistics, paradoxes, non sequitur, and occasionalismscompounding. Currently creativity-based identity gives way to universalization-based ITCI marked by positive politeness, indirect commissives, pronouns of inclusiveness, indefiniteness, and metonymic identification of the product with its owner. Productassociated descriptors are at the core of the ITCI field of needs. Peripheral is the need for respect, even more peripheral is the need for in-group affiliation and cognitive needs.
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach
oai:bibliotekacyfrowa.ujk.edu.pl:8006 ; doi:10.25951/4824
Token : A Journal of English Linguistics
14 lut 2023
13 lut 2023
45
https://bibliotekacyfrowa.ujk.edu.pl/publication/4824