ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews contributions of corpus-based research to readers' understanding of the discourse of advertising. It begins with a brief overview of some of the major developments in advertising, including some of its controversial practices. Subsequently, research studies that have used a corpus approach to investigating aspects of advertising are reviewed. This is extended by a focal analysis, which demonstrates how corpus tools can be effectively adopted to explore discursive practices of new forms of digital advertising. For the purpose of the focal analysis, a small corpus of native ads sourced from BuzzFeed was created. BuzzFeed is a global digital news platform which was created in the United States in 2006. The focus is on native ads. Native ads were selected after browsing the BuzzFeed website. The chapter concludes with observations regarding opportunities and limitations of a corpus-based discourse analysis to study advertising and discusses avenues for future research.
