Language in Advertising: Assignment

Language in Advertising

Spring 2018

Advertisers, like the military, rely heavily on what Grice terms the “cooperative principle” when trying to persuade us to buy their goods. This means they know how people in the culture “think” and will exploit this when engaging in what seems like an “honest attempt to communicate”. In particular they exploit the fact that making implicatures (connotation), based on this principle of cooperation is a crucial part of linguistic communication within a culture. We don’t have to explicitly state everything we mean when we share cultural knowledge. Language users do not easily distinguish however, between the logical entailments (denotation) of utterance, and the implicatures (connotations) drawn from utterances. Entailments are the facts that are logically NECESSARY for the proposition to be true, implicatures are the facts that we ASSUME to be true based on the cooperative principle of communication in a shared culture. Because advertisers are legally responsible for ONLY the logical entailments of their claims, they often craft their ads so that their audience makes favorable, but false, implicatures (inferences).

How do they do this? Strategies of Deception:

1.     Leave out the than clause or prepositional phrase in the comparative construction.

(ex) “ Campbell’s Soup has one-third less salt” (than what, the Dead Sea?)

2.    Use fine print restrictions.

(ex) “Win, and go anywhere in the US that Delta flies” (Some restrictions may apply)-(woops, like to everywhere but Topeka in February).

3.    Use idiomatic language.

(ex) “Mercedes Benz, engineered like no other car in the world” (aren’t they all?) The hearer interprets this idiomatically, because the literal translation is too stupid, we suspect.

4.    Use modal auxiliary verbs to qualify strong statements.

(ex) “If you don’t go to Midas, you could be paying too much for your muffler” (and you might be paying lass as well)

(ex) “Bounce leaves your clothes virtually static free!” (but not actually static free).

Assignment:

         Now that you are on to them, see if you can describe the entailments and implicatures of the following advertising claims. What strategies of deception do they employ? Show how these strategies are culture-bound.

1.     “The other brand’s decongestant lasts only four hours per dose, and it contains aspirin, which can upset your stomach. Contac lasts up to twelve hours per dose and does not contain aspirin”.

2.    “I used to have dandruff, so I tried Head and Shoulders. Then I tried Selson Blue. Blue is better”.

3.    “STP reduced engine lifter wear up to 6.8%” (fine print at bottom of TV screen: results vary by type of car, oil, and driving).

4.    “People from Ford [county] prefer Chevy Trucks”.

5.    “Isn’t it time you got your health on the right course? Now you can cut back on cholesterol, cut back on sodium, cut back on fat and still love the food you eat because now there’s new Right Choice from Stouffer’s”.

6.    **Find and analyze one other commercial in print or on TV.