ABSTRACT
If the linguistic tools that advertisers employ are related to the repertoires of their intended audience, then turning our attention to what happens when audiences decode messages is a productive endeavour. Traditionally scholars have tried to understand the work of advertising in all its components by analysing texts and inferring audiences from their construction as perspective target (Hmensa 2010). Evidently this inference is useful insofar as it accounts for the processes that happen at a discursive level but leaves the response of the audience outside the principal focus of research. Bullo (2014) discusses this problem, highlighting that discursive researchers, who constitute the large majority of the linguists working on advertising, see social representations as originating from discursive practices. This approach is in many ways awaiting complementation in that the role of cognition still needs to be explored in conjunction with textual components (ibid: 36). In other words, not only the context of production but also the context of reception needs to be analysed.
