2.8 Related Studies
Until now, there are myriad research findings on advertisement discourse and social actor representations. It suggests an implication that these fields can be
considered as sophisticated and important topics in academic discourse. From those valuable scientific studies, there are several ones which give significant contributions
in the form of inspiration and guidelines to the flow of this study. The study on consumers’ ability to assess the brand information conducted by
Maclnnis, Moorman and Jaworski 1991 is the first related study taken in this research. Their study concerns greatly on the link between the advertising executional
cues and the consumers’ motivation, opportunity, and ability MOA to attain communication effectiveness in processing the brand information from an
advertisement. This study claims that there are strategies for the advertisement to enhance the MOA for the sake of reaching the communication outcomes expected by
the advertisers. This enhancement strategy is drawn upon reviewing the role of MOA in brand information processing from advertisement. Afterwards, they correlate these
roles of MOA with advertising executional strategies and cues in the processing activity forming a conceptual framework of advertisement design strategies. It is then
followed by proposing measurement procedures of consumers’ MOA in the brand information processing to create andor to maintain the brand memory and positive
attitude in the communication. Regarding the advertising executional strategies and cues, there is a
dissertation by Bulawka 2006 which investigates a specific strategy of advertisement in her country. She analyzes the popularity of English usage in Polish
advertising which covers 79 percent of the collected data. This finding indicates the growing popularity of English in Poland by reference to its prominent role as the
language of global advertising as well as its sociological function signalling westernization and internationalization social values.
The last related study analyses the European Union EU academic discourse in term of hybridization executed by Polese and D’Avanzo 2012. They highlight the
exploitation of various types of different genre and discursive practices in the EU academic discourse that are included in the characteristics of commercial
communication. It aims to provide an understanding on how EU constructs its academic discourse through the colonisation of promotional genres in academic and
professional contexts. Hence, the considerable investigation is on the academic institution role in this hybridization discourse. By applying van Leeuwen’s social
actor representations, they analyse the brochures for university students from 2007 to 2010 and form a corpus of 57,837 words. The result of the study shows that EU
represents itself as a service provider for the empowerment of the students rather than a supranational organization. The self-representation is achieved by exploiting real
role models comprise of the students in the academic institutions to attract the possible future students.
The erstwhile research influences this study to consider some cognitive attempts to answer the provided research questions. For instance, there are social
factors integrated with linguistic and non-linguistic designs employed in the complex promotional strategy of advertisement in a particular context. Furthermore, there is
evidence that English is the most popular strategy in the global advertising which
carries certain social values to the brand image making. One of possible methods to investigate the realization of these social values can be conducted by social actor
representation proposed by van Leeuwen, especially to the ingrained brand positive values desired by the customers.
Related to the presented researches, this study attempts to investigate the social value embodied in the advertising cues, especially in the verbal element. The
investigated social value is the identity-building strategy executed in the usage of English in the discourse. However, instead of analyzing it based on the
standardization versus adaptation theoretical framework applied in Bulawka’s study 2006, this research implements two methods of study: the transitivity and the socio-
semantic representations. These applications are deemed appropriate with the objectives of the study in investigating the creative grammatical and lexical choices
reflected in the transitivity processes and socio-semantic categories which mirror the opinion, idea, or suggestion implied by the commercial advertisers to induce the
prospective customers to consume their products in Indonesia.
2.9 Theoretical Framework