A sociolinguistic study of discourse of consumerism in SMS advertisements of Iran

With recently widespread use of mobile phones and SMS communication in Iran and reformulation of conventional communication practices, short message advertisements have recently started to gain prominence in the world of advertisement as a quick, less costly, available and reliable means of introducing the products and services offered by the companies and institutions. With this in mind, the present study focuses on a qualitative /quantitative sociolinguistic study of 100 SMS advertisements in Iran. Having divided the messages into four categories according to message senders, it has tried to highlight statistically the effect of message type on message length, the role of semiotics, the lexicogrammatical tools of nominalization, intensifiers, and connotatively-loaded consumerism discourse as well as foregrounding, intertextuality and the type of address terms in persuading the message receivers to buy or use the products and services advertised and impose them on the recipients in addition to a reference to the effect of prevalent ideology on the contents of the message.