English Language Advertisement Essay

Plan: 1. Advertising is one of the most prominent and powerful uses of language. 2. The Features of Advertising. 3. Is advertising language normal language? Does advertising language sometimes break the rules of normal language? 4. References. 1. Advertising is one of the most prominent and powerful uses of language. Advertising is one of the most prominent, powerful, and ubiquitous contemporary uses of language. Its seductive and controversial quality has attracted consistent and intense attention across a range of academic disciplines including linguistics, media studies, politics, semiotics, and sociology. The reasons for this academic interest are far from superficial. The study of advertising brings together many of the key social and political issues of our time: the new capitalism; globalization; overconsumption and the environment; cultural and individual identities; and the communications revolution. It provides insight into the ideologies and values of contemporary societies. Advertising’s creative use of language makes it a particularly rich site for language and discourse analysis. Operating in all media and exploiting the interaction between word, sound, and image, it provides a key location for studies of multimodal communication. Simultaneously poetic and commercial, it raises questions about the nature of creativity and art. Ever since the intensification of advertising in the 1950s, leading scholars have analyzed its use of language. This new four-volume Routledge Major Work brings together for the first time the most seminal and controversial works, allowing users to obtain a wide and inclusive view of this rewarding topic. It will be welcomed by scholars and other researchers in the field as an invaluable ‘mini library’ on the language of advertising. 2. The Features of Advertising Advertising Language is characterized by the following features. In any given advertisement these features may appear or be largely absent, such is the great variety of advertising copy found on promo products such as promotional tote bags and T-shirts. However these features may be said to be typical of advertising in general. Even advertisements which do not use the traditional features to attract inform and persuade may be described as being incontrast to the traditional features. Some modern advertisements appear to be almost dissuading consumers from their product – but this is a technique used as a determined way of not conforming to tradition. See Benetton, Marmite. Hyperbole – exaggeration, often by use of adjectives and adverbs. Frequent use of adjectives and adverbs. A limited range of evaluative adjectives includes new, clean, white, real, fresh, right, natural, big, great, slim, soft, wholesome, improved†¦ Neologisms may have novelty impact, e.g. Beanz, Meanz Heinz, Cookability, Schweppervescence, Tangoed, Wonderfuel†¦ Long noun phrases, frequent use of pre and post modifiers for descriptions. Short sentences for impact on the reader. This impact is especially clear at the beginning of a text, often using bold or large type for the â€Å"Headline† or â€Å"slogan† to capture the attention of the reader. Ambiguity is common. This may make a phrase memorable and re-readable. Ambiguity may be syntactic (the grammatical structure) or semantic (puns for example). Weasel words are often used. These are words which suggest a meaning without actually being specific. One type is the open comparative: â€Å"Brown’s Boots Are Better† (posing the question â€Å"better than what?†); another type is the bogus superlative: â€Å"Brown’s Boots are Best† (posing the question â€Å"rated alongside what?†) Euphemisms :†Clean Round the Bend† for a toilet cleaner avoids comment on â€Å"unpleasant† things. The classic exampe is â€Å"B.O† for â€Å"body odour† (in itself a euphemism for â€Å"smelly person†). Avoidance of negatives (advertising normally emphasises the positive side of a product – though see Marmite, Tango, Benetton, for whom it seems that all publicity is good). Simple and Colloquial language: â€Å"It ain’t half good† to appeal to ordinary people, though it is in fact often complex and deliberately ambiguous. Familiar language: use of second person pronouns to address an audience and suggest a friendly attitude. Present tense is used most commonly, though nostalgia is summoned by the simple past Simple vocabulary is most common, my mate Marmite, with the exception of technical vocabulary to emphasise the scientific aspects of a product (computers medicines and cars but also hair and cleaning products) which often comes as a complex noun phrase, the new four wheel servo-assisted disc brakes. Repetition of the brand name and the slogan, both of which are usually memorable by virtue of alliteration (the best four by four by far); rhyme (the cleanest clean it’s ever been); rhythm (drinka pinta milka day); syntactic parallelism (stay dry, stay happy); association (fresh as a mountain stream). Humour. This can be verbal or visual, but aims to show the product positively. Verbal Puns wonderfuel and graphic positions are common. Glamorisation is probably the most common technique of all. â€Å"Old† houses become charming, characterful, olde, worlde or unique. â€Å"Small† houses become compact, bijou, snug or manageable. Houses on a busy road become convenient for transport. A cafà © with a pavement table becomes a trattoria, moving up market aspires to be a restaurant, too cramped it becomes a bistro. Not enough room to serve it becomes a fast food servery. If the menu is English food it is likely to be traditional, home-baked or home made; if the menu is French the cake will be gateau, the potted meat patà ©, bits of toast in your soup will be croutons. The decor will be probably chic, possibly Provenà §al. Finally, potency. Vance Packard (1960) memorably said: â€Å"The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope †¦ we no longer buy oranges, and we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige.† 3. Is advertising language normal language? Does advertising language sometimes break the rules of normal language? These questions relate to the place of advertising language in the context of the readers’ general knowledge of language (we will presume that the language is English). In order to answer them, we must have some conception of what is meant by â€Å"normal language†. The English language has evolved to have many different kinds of functionality, each of which correspond to different situations and styles of use. From an analytic point of view, it seems to make most sense to understand â€Å"normal language† to include the variety of styles of English that mature speakers and readers control. This will form the backdrop of everyday language in its many functions, against which we can view advertising language. If one looks around in literature on advertising, or searches on the WWW, it is not uncommon to find claims to the effect that advertising breaks the rules of normal language and language use. However, from the perspective of a professional linguist, few of these claims really seem to be supportable. Now, with the exception of linguists, few people have any reason to pay close attention to the way that language is actually used in its speech community, for a wide range of communicative functions. Like many aspects of human being and human behavior, our unconscious knowledge of language is much greater than our conscious knowledge of it, so the facts about language that are immediately accessible to the average person only cover part of what the language is and how it is used. Collect some text from advertisements that you have found. Can you find any examples of words, phrases or constructions that are truly different from the various varieties that you encounter on a regular basis? These varieties may include informal spoken language between close friends to technical and scientific descriptions (more likely to be written), and everything in between. Doubtless, not all of the text you find will be standard English, but is any of it not English at all? In doing this exercise, it may be that you will learn more about what creative possibilities your language allows, rather than how much advertising goes beyond the boundaries of that language. In a recent short article in the journal Nature, Pullum and Scholz (2001) point out that, at every level, language has a level of creativity that allows it to be ever-expanding, ever-changing. Even the idea that there is a stock of words which constitute the English language cannot be upheld, because it is always possible to invent new words, and new names in particular. Thus, â€Å"Here is my new invention; I call it â€Å"X† † is a strategy in everyday English which advertisers can take advantage of, when the y state â€Å"Introducing the all-new â€Å"Y† â€Å". In an interesting coincidence which illustrates the point very clearly, the Dreamweaver ® program which we have used to construct this website has the command â€Å"Indent† to indent a paragraph, and we used it to format the quote below from McQuarrie and Micks. In the command menu, the command after this one is â€Å"Outdent†, which makes a paragraph wider. Neither of us had seen this word before, yet we understood its meaning, and certainly did not reject it as â€Å"non-English†. This is not to say that any random new word can be generated for the author’s purposes in any context. The â€Å"Outdent† example above is presented in a very clear context, which makes apprehending its usage and meaning quite clear. We generally find that novel words presented in an advertisement have the same supporting context; they may be new, but they are not â€Å"out of the blue†. The work of McQuarrie and Mick (1996) is highly relevant in this context. They place advertising language in the context of the study of rhetoric, and observe: â€Å"A rhetorical figure has traditionally been defined as an artful deviation (Corbett 1990). More formally, a rhetorical figure occurs when an expression deviates from expectation, the expression is not rejected as nonsensical or faulty, the deviation occurs at the level of form rather than content, and the deviation conforms to a template that is invariant across a variety of content and contexts. This definition supplies the standard against which deviation is to be measured (i.e., expectations), sets a limit on the amount and kind of deviation (i.e., short of a mistake), locates the deviation at the level of the formal structure of a text, and imposes a grouping requirement (i.e., there are a limited number of templates, each with distinct characteristics).† The unusual aspects of language that we sometimes find in advertising can be fruitfully considered to be examples of â€Å"artful deviations†. 36.3 VW ad (Rolling Stone, May 23, 2002): Heck, it’s been re-everything-ed. This new verb is coined on the basis of a very robust feature of English, which allows nouns to be used as verbs (see Clark and Clark (1979)). In this case, the new verb is also prefixed and suffixed. Out of the blue, â€Å"to re-everything† would be hard to interpret, but in the context provided by the advertisement, its meaning is clear. In the summer of 2002 the pop group No Doubt had a hit song called â€Å"Hella Good†; some of the lyrics are shown here: Hella Good (G. Stefani/ T. Dumont/ P. Williams/ C. Hugo/ T. Kanal) You got me feeling hella good So let’s just keep on dancing You hold me like you should So I’m gonna keep on dancing (Keep on dancing) â€Å"Hella good† is not advertising language, and it is not standard English, but it is certainly â€Å"pop music English†, and it is the kind of phrase that anyone could produce in conversation. In 48 Cointreau (InStyle, August 2002) we find an example of a blend, â€Å"Be Cointreauversial†.