Dialogic and Argumentative Structures of Bumper Stickers

Abstract

Bumper stickers are again in fashion in Turkey, and many contain English-language text. The aim of this work is to analyze the dialogic and argumentative structures of these stickers. Typically, the people who use these English-language stickers are young, come from wealthy families and study at English-speaking universities. However, the content of these discourses are unfamiliar to most of the Turkish population, since the subject matter, the language, and the messages of discourses are foreign to the population. The analysis assumes that the person using the bumper sticker wants to establish a dialogue with others. The people who read these stickers start to participate in the dialogue. It is important to investigate the argumentation of these discourses in syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels. The bumper stickers show that members of the young generation want to show that they belong to a privileged social class.