Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

The recent prevalence of SMS advertisements led to the interest in the current study in analysing their linguistic and discoursal features in order to reach their underlying structure. Therefore, the study attempted to analyse the generic features of English SMS advertisements sent to mobile phones in Egypt. The researcher adopted Bhatia{u2019}s (1993) analytical framework of analysing unfamiliar genres to examine these features which include the recurring moves of the SMS messages as well as the grammatical, lexical and spelling features. Within this main framework, the researcher employed several analytical frameworks to analyse different aspects of SMS advertisements: Bhatia{u2019}s (1993) move analysis framework to examine the schematic structure, Halliday and Matthiessen{u2019}s (2014) systemic functional grammar and Hasan{u2019}s (1989) Cline of Dynamism to analyse the grammatical features, and Tagg{u2019}s (2012) and Crystal{u2019}s (2008) analytical frameworks to investigate the lexical and spelling characteristics. The findings revealed that some features, suitable for the genre, were recurrent in all SMS advertisements, whereas others were avoided, or rarely used, because they would not help in making these advertisements effective. Moreover, a number of features were frequently used in specific themes to serve certain purposes. The distinctive linguistic and discoursal features, determined in this study as characteristic of SMS advertisements, were helpful in identifying the underlying structure for writing such advertisements

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