This paper examines the use of visuals and discourse features of advertisements for drugs and dietary supplements in four different monthly health magazines. Drawing on Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, the present study compared the form and organization of linguistic and visual elements in the ads through a discourse analysis approach. The findings show that drug ads depended more on visuals to reconstruct contexts that the potential consumers could relate to than ads for dietary supplements. This contextual effect thus maximized the relevance of products to the magazine readers. Three discourse features that reflect intertextuality were identified in the data, including adopting discourse representation or speech reportage, mixing discourse types, and recycling. Both visuals and linguistics/discourse devices were used strategically to a certain extent in order to reinforce the contextual implicature and relevance between products and potential consumers.
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