Medical Authority in Pharmaceutical Ads

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Hi Maggie, could you elaborate on "register displacement"?  Is it like 
mimicked self-quotation in a different "voice"?  I wrote something on "code 
displacement" some years, though I don't know if that's the same thing. 
It's: Celso Álvarez-Cáccamo. 1996. "The power of reflexive language(s): 
Code displacement in reported speech". Journal of Pragmatics 25, pp. 33-59. 
You can get it at: http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/artigos/1996jop.pdf .

-celso
Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo

At 12:58 02-11-2007 +0000, Maggie Ronkin wrote:

>One of my student researchers—in a BS/MD program—is studying 
>pharmaceutical advertisements.  She is analyzing televised ads for 
>products to enhance the sexual performance of women and men, although the 
>purpose of the products is never mentioned directly.  For example, 
>according to my student, one ad depicts three women chatting about PMS 
>casually in what looks like an after-work bar setting.  After one offers 
>another a folk diagnosis and recommends a pharmaceutical product, a third, 
>in a different and detached voice, mentions the possible side effects of 
>taking the product. This warning probably is required by law.  In the end, 
>the ad plays on humorous recognition that the third woman not only is one 
>of the girls (who interacts casually and even uses a bit of non-standard 
>grammar), but also is a physician.  We are trying to characterize the 
>voice/voicing of medical authority that delivers the warning, which, 
>female or male, is performed in other ads of the same genre.  Some 
>students have applied terrific concepts of entextualization, and we also 
>have coined a not sufficiently multimodal term, register 
>displacement.  Can anyone help us characterize this phenomenon from the 
>literature or simply by brainstorming?
>
>Thank you very much.
>
>Maggie Ronkin