Pastiche and Parody in Greek Radio Advertisements

Radio advertisements use playful imitation as a discourse tactic that creates positive feelings toward the advertised product. A specific discourse imitates another discourse on the basis of two opposing strategies: captation and subversion. In captation, the investor discourse borrows the cultural capital of the source discourse, a practice corresponding to pastiche, while in subversion, imitation allows for the subversion of the cultural capital of the source discourse, a practice linked to parody. Analysis of 347 advertisements transmitted by private radio stations in Thessaloniki and Athens between the years 2004 and 2007 shows that radio ads imitate not only various genres or texts (as usually argued in the literature), but also features of the linguistic system and its varieties. Moreover, it is shown that pastiche and parody have informative or playful purpose, thus formulating a continuum of four versions of imitation, ranging from informative pastiche to playful parody.