Interpreting Pragmatics of the Matrimonial Adverts: A socio-cultural perspective

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring how matrimonial adverts construe experience through language with a focus on how marriage discourse is conducted in the two cultures, as a way of reinforcing the SFL claim that language reflects and constructs context of culture (Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999). Historically, marriage was considered not only a romantic tale, but a right to exploit the women as commodities so they were advertised by screening the consumer-ship pertaining to romantic stereotypes. Over a period of time, the marital relationships changed and the clients started showcasing their demands more openly. The traits advertised include age group, skin colour and appearance, social stature, caste and ethnicity, education and occupation etc. to complement the demands in the two cultures; western and the Pakistan. This paper present the hypothesis that there would be socio-cultural differences in the adverts from the two cultures in focus. Since the marriage discourses offer a rewarding data on how the people choose to display their intended attributes regarding socio-cultural frats, therefore, are of great interest to the discourse analysts to unfold linguistic patterns employed. The paper draws on the systemic functional framework (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) for discourse analysis mainly the genre analysis, lexico-grammatical choices and the appraisal (Thompson 2014). The data is collected from different sources including the print as well as the digital media from the two cultures embedding match-making practices. In total 50 adverts have been scrutinized which look representative of the given cultures to make a comparison. The findings are consistent with the predictions hypothesized and illuminate the ways in which the two cultures portray the marriage clients.