The rhetorics of fictive interaction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation

I can't believe it's not butter! (Dairy brand) The paper examines imagined dialogue, a.k.a. fictive (verbal) interaction, in the strategically motivated discourse of advertising campaigns, i.e., discourse designed for the specific purpose of promoting a particular agenda or commercial product. The paper furthermore explores the grammatical aspect of the examined direct-speech metonymies. Though excluded so far from the grammars of Germanic languages, embedded utterances may in fact function as heads or modifiers in syntactic phrases and as sentence functions (e.g., direct object, verb). The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate how embedded utterances function linguistically as well as rhetorically in the discourse of marketing – a particularly high-stakes genre of professional communication – and to stipulate hypotheses concerning strategic motivations for this employment of non-quotational direct speech.