The Simulation of Intimacy in Australian Online Advertising

Online advertising is a relatively new linguistic genre, situated somewhere between written and spoken discourse, traditional advertising language and Netspeak, and between mass and personal communication, on which little scientific research has been done so far. What distinguishes online advertising most from traditional advertising is that it opens up the possibility of addressing customers more directly, or of making them believe they are addressed directly, which allows the advertiser to create - or simulate - intimate conversations with their audience. This is reflected in the language of online advertisements on many levels, ranging from syntactic structures to specific vocabulary to pragmatic tools, such as presuppositions and simulated turn taking. The work at hand analyses the linguistic elements of Web advertising associated with the creation and simulation of intimacy on the word-, sentence- and discourse level.