ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a broad genre-ecological and genre-analytical view of green advertising as a growing subset of commercial/corporate communication. Green(-washed) persuasion is described here as a genre space of three inter-related sub-genres: green commercial, green-washed commercial and green nonprofit/social advertising. Based on prototypical samples the chapter sketches out some of the main linguistic and semiotic properties of each sub-genre. The analyses focus on the overall structure/format of the texts, their thematic development and argumentation, text—image relations, lexis and pragmatic techniques. Besides these multimodal genre portraits the chapter also provides a general ecolinguistic characterization of advertising, a brief survey of the historical development of eco-advertising and suggestions for further research.
