Pragmatic Analysis of the Advertising Language. Abstract

Shayma Abdulla Al-Azzawi PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE ADVERTISING LANGUAGE An Abstract

PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE ADVERTISING LANGUAGE An Abstract Shayma Abdulla Al-Azzawi Supervised by Asst. Prof. Abdul Karim Fadhil, Ph.D Instr. Salam Hamid Abbas. Ph.D. 1.

Preliminary Remarks With the rocketing development of technology and commercial economy, the design and types of advertisement vary greatly. In the mean time, the social role that advertisements play attracts more and more attentive eyes in the society. It is clearly seen that advertisement makers exert great effort in the use of language, which becomes more and more delicate, attractive, and offers much for thought. Advertising language, considered as having interactional function, does not merely inform the customers about what is sold, but also to attract the customers‟ attention so that an act of purchasing will expectedly follow from the language expression. Thus, it is evident that the advertisers attempt to

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establish a good social relationship with the customers. Therefore, the charming specialty and exquisite form of advertising language contribute considerably to the selling of products. The study and analysis of advertising language, as well, becomes a new item for language learners. The following will mainly focus on the analysis of advertising language from the pragmatic aspect, especially Grice‟s cooperative principle. The pragmatic implicature in advertisement use still has many good and typical examples. Through the analysis in the light of the cooperative priniciple, it is better to understand the advertising language and help develop the design of new and more exquisite advertisements. In the meantime, it can be seen that the implicature of most advertisements can be controlled and give consumers enough space to deduct the deep and non-conventional implications from the literal semantic meanings. The hypothesis of the research states that, “In advertisement, implicature and entailment are made use of in a way that serves the purposes of the advertiser irrespective of whether the addressee‟s entailment is the same as that of the advertiser or not.”

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Advertising often takes advantage of implicature to make claims that people interpret to be more powerful than they really are. It has been shown that understanding advertisements is not merely a matter of decoding, and that the interpretation of advertisements is best approached from a pragmatic point of view. However, it has been suggested that pragmatists who have analysed advertisements do not present a convincing and thorough account of the nature and role of context. Instead they attempt to make use of notions of goal-bounded activities or sets of rules, which are demonstrably insufficient to explain how audiences understand advertisements. In short, existing approaches to the language of advertising share the defects of the theories of communication on which they are based. 2. The Communicative Form of The Advertising Language From the communicative point of view, one piece of advertisement can be seen as a communicative action, oneway communication. Advertisers have to keep good social relationships between producers and consumers through the only effective way which is advertising. There will be no chance of mutual communication and information exchange.

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Therefore, advertising language pays more attention than any other to the interpersonal function of language, concerning closely with psychology, sociology, aesthetics, etc. At the same time, Grice‟s cooperative principle is fully reflected in advertising language (Guowen 1997: 2). 3. The Cooperative Principle of Grice and The Advertising Language Grice‟s suggestion is that there is a set of over-arching assumptions that guide the conduct of conversation. These arise from basic rational considerations and may be formulated as guidelines for the efficient and effective use of language in conversation to further cooperative ends. Grice identifies as guidelines of this sort four basic maxims of conversation or general principles that underlie the efficient cooperative use of language, which jointly express a general cooperative principle. The cooperative principles are expressed as follows: the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance, and the maxim of manner. In this regard, Widdowson (2007: 130) demonstrated that, These are the four tenets of the cooperative principle. The quantity maxim relates to amount of information provided, the quality maxim to its truth, the

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relation maxim to its relevance, and the manner maxim to how it is expressed. In short, these maxims specify what participants have to do in order to converse in a maximally efficient, rational, cooperative way. Thus, they should speak sincerely, relevantly, clearly, and provide sufficient information. Grice‟s theory leads to new studying interests in pragmatic field, and eventually becomes the basis for pragmatic study (Grice 1975: 41-43). The appropriate application and control of Grice‟s cooperative principle in advertising language help the full expression of producers in their selling and provide sufficient food for thought. The study of implicatures has developed very well and now it is forming the cornerstone of most pragmatic approaches. This linguist and philosopher Herbert Paul Grice is principally associated with implicatures. He argued that in natural language, communication can take place when speakers enter a non-verbal agreement over methods of interpreting what is being said. This agreement takes into considerations the rules by which implicatures work and have a form of cooperation which is called the cooperative principle, this principle including its maxims of quality,

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quantity, relation and manner, has been greatly influential in grammar studies (Finch 2000: 149). An important note about these maxims is not to consider them representing a descriptive statement of how conversational contributions are. For there are occasions when speakers decide to „unostentatiously‟ violate a maxim, s/he may lie, s/he may give information that has lack of relevance, or may provide utterances that can be later realized as ambiguous. Moreover, there are much more important occasions when a speaker breaks a maxim for certain reasons such as s/he faces a clash between two maxims, and that would make it impossible for the speaker/writer to be as specific as s/he should be and still his speech would lack adequate evidence, perhaps he chose to flout a maxim, „that is to say he may blatantly fail to fulfil it.” In such cases, the conversational maxims provide a basis for the reader to „infer‟ what is conversationally being „implicated‟ (Coulthard 1985: 31). 3.1. Maxim of Quality This maxim requires making the contribution one that is true, specifically: a) Do not say what you believe to be false.

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Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Generally, for selling, advertisements will state mainly the strong points of the products to help consumers know about them and trust them to the best advantage. However, from the communicative point of view, a piece of advertisement is one act of behaviour. Advertisers are required to convey true information to consumers to help them make purchasing choices. Therefore, still advertisers should remember that saying the truth is always the vitality of advertisements. Proceeding from the interests of the consumers‟ state, the shortcoming may gain unexpected results. This is noticed from the following example of a Pizza Hut ad: A meal for two for $2.99 each. Any medium feast pizza and regular salad for only $5.98 This simple advertisement of Pizza Hut adopts no colourful decorations in language, but only tells the truth and useful information. Yet it attracts a great number of customers every day. According to Grice, the use of metaphor, irony and exaggeration are all against the maxim of quality. Yet, the suitable use of them will also gain good effect. This can be shown from the next travelling advertisement in Thailand.

b)

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The problems of a holiday in Thailand: heavy-traffic, falling masonry, getting trapped, getting lost, eye strain, excess baggage, missing your flight. Superficially, the advertisement exaggerates the inconvenience of travelling in Thailand, but actually implies that the beauty of the city and colourful shopping may make the tourists forget about their returning journey. Another advertisement is taken from The Times of London occupying a full page of the newspaper with a picture of the vehicle that carried the first astronaut to the moon with the legend printed below “It is ugly but it takes you there”. Then, just beside the logo of Volks Wagon printed. Here, the advertisement admits that the Beatle is ugly but it does the work An example of an ad that violates the maxim of quality is: Pioneer: Everything you hear is true. This ad by generalizing the use of „everything‟ is violating the maxim of quality for not proving adequate evidence. 3.2. Maxim of Quantity This maxim demands: a) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposed of the exchange).

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b) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Advertisements have no fixed form. Being longer or shorter will mainly rely on the needs of the designers and makers. Of course, advertisements are conclusive, systematic, informative and rigorous. For instance, the following famous medicine advertisement successfully passes the information to their consumers that: the effectiveness of a kind of medicine does not depend on the quantity but quality. For example: Two pills, one in the morning, one at night, remove sneeze. This ad shows that these pills are of a great quality that only two of them a day can help a person get rid of sneezing that is caused by flu or allergy. Another advertisement about margarine, vegetable butter. Since an ad should tell the truth according to the law, the margarine could not be labelled as “butter” because “butter” is a dairy product, but the advertisement wanted to identify the product as “The butter that is not butter.” An example of an ad that violates this maxim is, Clariol: “Does she? .... or doesn’t she?”

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This ad violates maxim of quantity because its contribution is not as is required (Grice 1975: 58). 3.3. Maxim of Relevance This maxim requires making the contribution relevant. As it is stated by Grice: a) Be relevant. This is the most significant advertisement designing, which often employs association to pass useful information and to touch consumers. Precise, relevant and appropriate association contributes greatly to the selling and the understanding of the products. Of course, association should be natural but not fabricate. One surgery operation monitor advertisement is as follows: “No one should have to work without a net.” This ad is matched with a frame of a man walking the wire without any safe net, audiences may feel puzzled at the first sight, but with the second thought, the relevance is obvious. As everyone knows, operations are dangerous and demands superb skill of the doctors. Without the monitor is just like without the safe net. The important role of the

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operation monitor is cleverly indicated through the advertisement. 3.4. Maxim of Manner This maxim demands the users to: a) Be perspicuous. b) Avoid obscurity of expression. c) Avoid ambiguity. For example an ad about rat-hunting service: “One call ... That’s all” This ad clearly indicates that if you have a rat at home, all you need to do is calling that service and the help would be on its way to help you from this problem (Grice 1975: 5054). However, Grice did not assume that all people should constantly follow these maxims. Instead, he found it interesting when these were “flouted” or “violated” (either purposefully or unintentionally) by speakers, which would imply some other, hidden meaning. The importance was in what was not said. For example: “It is raining” is in violation of quality and quantity of spoken language; however, in context (e.g when someone has suggested a game of tennis) the reasoning behind this „fragment‟ sentence becomes clear (Mey 2001: 76).

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An example of an ad that violates the maxim of manner is: The Economics: For top laps. This is a manner maxim violation for it is an ambiguous claim. 4. Flouting Grice’s Maxims Human interaction would be very difficult and counterproductive if it lacks cooperation. Therefore, the Cooperative Principle and the Gricean Maxims are not specific to conversation but to interaction as a whole. For example, it would not make sense to reply to a question about the weather with an answer about groceries because that would violate the Maxim of Relevance. Likewise, responding to a request for some milk with an entire gallon instead of a glass would violate the maxim of quality. However, it is possible to flout a maxim intentionally or unconsciously and thereby convey a different meaning than what is literally spoken/ written. Many times in conversation, this flouting is manipulated by a speaker/ writer in order to produce a negative pragmatic effect, as with sarcasm or irony. One can flout the maxim of quality to tell a clumsy friend who has just taken a bad fall that his nimble gracefulness is impressive and obviously intend to

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mean the complete opposite. The Gricean maxims are therefore often purposefully flouted by comedians and writers, who may hide the complete truth and manipulate their words for the effect of the story and the sake of the reader‟s experience (Ibid: 77). 5. The Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature: Utterances, as a kind of language information passing state, are not always so direct and clear, but on the contrary, in a roundabout way with the basic condition of maintaining communication. The correct and successful application of pragmatic implicature can be a significant way of language expression technique. Moreover appropriate language technique will in different degrees change the conventional language to a non-conventional ones and to achieve speakers‟ special purposes. However, the use of conversational implicature should be better controlled and take the audience‟s comprehension level, the position of the content and the aesthetic requirement into consideration. This is especially crucial in advertising language (Guown 1997: 2). Moreover, Language is the media for human communication and information transmission. In daily

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communication, our conversation includes both conventional and non-conventional sense of the linguistic expressions uttered. However, non-conventional implicature indicates more than what is actually said. The conversational implicature of the speaker is expressed through the combination of literal semantic meaning with a specific context. Pragmatics recognizes the importance of context, and thus can reveal the meaning underlying a certain utterance. To construct the appropriate meaning in an exchange, the speakers and the hearers need to negotiate it, taking physical, social, and linguistic contexts as well as the meaning potential of the utterances into consideration (Thomas 1995:20 ). Grice (1975: 45) shifts the focus to those aspects of meaning which are not semantically determined. He calls these „conversational implicature‟, as opposed to semantically determined „conventional implicature‟. Conversational implicature is worked out from the meaning of the sentence uttered, together with the context, on the basis of the assumption that communication is goverened by the co-operative principle. The assumption is that the speaker has observed certain general maxims of communication.

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In a series of influential and controversial papers of Grice (1957:66), (1968: 4), (1969: 68). He argued that the meaning of a word or a non-natural sign in general is a derivative function of what speakers mean by that word in individual instances of uttering it. That is, the universal „type‟ meaning, or a set of such meanings, for a given word is an abstraction from the „token‟ meanings that speakers mean for the word in specific instances of use. Among other things, this account opposes the formalist orthodoxy in semantic theory, according to which the universal conventional meaning or set of meaning of a word predetermines what that word may mean by a word in a certain utterance; in order to understand the utterance, it is enough to know what the word means „tout court‟. But Grice holds that what a word „means‟ derives from what speakers mean by uttering it; and he further holds that a particular speaker or writer means by a sign on a particular occasion among well diverge from the standard meaning of the sign (Grice 1957: 381). 6. Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory Sperber and Wilson‟s Relevance Theory provides the most comprehensive account of utterance interpretation. Their framework is based on ostentation (an attempt to hide

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the real thing), the communicator‟s intention to communicate and to publicise his intention, and the principle that an ostensive stimulus creates a presumption of optimal relevance. The task of the audience in ostensive communication is to process the communicator‟s utterance against background information and derive an interpretation which is consistent with the principle of relevance. Relevance Theory will now be applied to the analysis of advertisements, focussing on convert communication, puns, and metaphors. Moreover, Sperber and Wilson (1995: 260) postulated that there are two principles of relevance, defined as follows: 1- Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance. 2- Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. The first principle is to do with cognition, while the second one is about communication. 7. Implicature in the Advertising Language 7.1 Implicature and Entailment Entailment is a „term derived from formal logic and now often used as part of the study of semantics; it is also called entailingness. It refers to a relation between a pair

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of sentences such that the truth of the second sentence necessarily follows from the truth of the first, e.g. I can see a dog- I can see an animal‟ (Crystal 2003: 162). Another example can be given about entailment: a) Jane drives a Ford. b) Jane drives a car. It is easy to notice that if (a) is true, then (b) has to be true too, therefore, (a) entails sentence (b). Moreover, the concept of implicature differs slightly from entailment, but these two concepts are related in a way that makes them sometimes tricky to tease apart, as far as language use is concerned. Let us take this pair of sentences: 1) Not everyone is going to come. 2) Someone is going to come. A reader may believe that sentence (1) entails sentence (2), but it actually does not. That is if you arranged a school party and invited friends; I may say “not everyone is going to come”, you respond with “at least someone is going to come” and you would be surprised to arrive and see that absolutely no one showed up, because the sentence “not everyone is going to come” implicates that someone is going to come, but however does not entail it. Moreover, it is

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important to notice that “not everyone is going to come” can also be true in a situation which “no one is going to come.” Considering the above illustration, it is seen that the Gricean maxim of quantity plays a role. For if a person wanted to mean that “no one is going to come” s/he would have said so and that contribution would be as informative as required. Bearing this in mind, implicature can be implied to the advertising language as this ad: ABC filters remove bacteria from your drinking water. In a normal language use, a reader can understand this ad as, if you use ABC filters, these filters will remove all the bad bacteria from your drinking water; but that is not actually entailed from the mentioned advertisement. On the one hand, some entailment is that bacteria is removed by ABC filters, then this claim is true. On the other hand, if that is the truth, then the consumer would be deceived if s/he buys ABC filters on the basis of the above claim, because s/he understands what is implicated not what was entailed. Implicature is the essence of our communication, and people often understand implicature to be the same as entailment in our daily communication, although the two concepts are not the same (Gazdar 1979: 42).

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It is worth mentioning that this type of sentence used in this ad is called generic because it has a possible general reading. Generic sentences have the property of making strong statements, such as „dogs bark‟ which means that a general property of dogs that they bark. In the bacteria advertisement, the consumer finds the generic reading which is often the default reading in such constructions which is “all bacteria.” However, also there is a possibility that the sentence has a non-generic or literal reading. If the advertiser meant by his ad that only „some bacteria‟ will be removed by ABC filters then s/he violates the maxim of relevance, that is if we consider the consumer is interested in buying the filter to ensure water purity. The advertiser here is exploiting the default nature of generic reading in order to take advantage of the consumer‟s belief upon his ad as referring „all bacteria‟ or „all harmful bacteria.‟ Based on the previous discussion, it is noticed that advertising often takes advantage of implicature in order to create claims which people interpret to be more powerful than they actually are. Moreover, there is another example of an ad using implicature:

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Cambell’s soup has one third less salt. This ad could seem a bit vague from the first glance, but reasonably it can be interpreted as the soup is one third less salt than other relevant benchmark. That benchmark could have less level of salt compared to a major competitor, considering the average of all nationally sold soups, of an earlier productions of Campbell‟s soup. This analysis is due to Gricean maxim, for it would be totally irrelevant to claim that the mentioned soup contains one third less salt than the Dead Sea. Here it is realized that communication can be misleading since advertisement readers make implicatures that are not necessarily true, for all it would take for the ad to be true for the advertiser to claim that the sentence is literally true. The main point to draw attention to is the limitations of logical entailment for understanding how meaning works, for implicature plays a huge role in our daily communication with each other. And advertisers take advantage of that by making many misleading claims. For sometimes advertising misleading can be surprising. Consider this ad:

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The Ford LTD is 700% quieter. A reader may interpret that Ford LTD is 700% quieter than other kinds of cars, or other Ford brands, but apparently Ford company admitted that they meant “the Ford LTD is 700% quieter than the outside.” In this case, Ford here by this claim is testing the line between vague claims and deceit (Kempson 1986:239). 8. Advertising and the Pragmatic Theory of Truth The pragmatic truth theory refers to those accounts, definitions, and theories of the concept of truth in question, various along lines that reflect the influence of several thinkers initially and notably, Charles S. Pierce and William James, there are also a number of common features can be identified. The most characteristic features are a reliance on the pragmatic maxim as a means of clarifying the meanings of difficult concepts, truth in particular, and an emphasis on the fact that the product is variously branded as belief, certainty, or truth is the result of a process, namely „inquiry‟. As Pierce (1901: 565) states: Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the

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confession of its inaccuracy and one-sideness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth. Pierce understands all thoughts as signs, and thus, according to his theory of thought, no thought is understandable outside the context of sign relation. Sign relations taken collectively are the subject matter of a theory of signs. Therefore, Pierce‟s semiotics, his theory of sign relations, are keys to understanding his entire philosophy of pragmatic thinking. According to the Pragmatic Theory of Truth in Advertising, Advertisers should be held responsible not only for conventional implicatures of what they say, but also for conversational implicatures of what they say (Cline 1998: 18). For example: Beasline, Baby Shampoo, Extra Gentle, No Tears! Here the advertiser makes a number of claims, including the above claim. The advertiser tries to convince the consumer to buy Beasline Baby Shampoo. It is obvious that kids tend to open their eyes when they wash their hair during bathing, the ad states that this shampoo does not hurt their eyes even if the shampoo goes into their eyes; this

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claim could be false, in case even one kid faced vision problems or eye infection after using this „no tear‟ shampoo.

Conclusion In accordance to the Pragmatic Theory of Truth in Advertising: “Advertisers should be held responsible not only for conventional implicatures of what they say, but also for conversational implicatures of what they say (Cline 1998: 18). The result of the research above, points to the fact that advertisers do not always do that and this means, that advertisers have failed their responsibilities in his respect. The data are then analysed for investigating hypothesis of the research which states that, “In advertisement, implicature and entailment are made use of in a way that serves the purposes of the advertiser irrespective of whether the addressee‟s entailment is the same as that of the advertiser or not.” In the ad “ABC filters remove bacteria from your drinking water” explained in 7.1. above does not specify the type of bacteria removed even though it is actually the harmful type which is actually entailed from the ad whereas

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what is implicated as the consumer will decode it is all types of bacteria. And since the general consensus amongst ordinary language users is that implicature and entailment are one and the same, the consumer is then misled by the ad. Other examples of such controversies may be identified in the data in the appendices of this research. This leads to the verification of the hypothesis of the research as stated above.

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___________. 1969. Utterer’s Meaning and Intention: Philosophical Review. London: H.P. Grice Publishing Press. Guowen, Huang. 1997. Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kempson, Ruth M. 1975. Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mey, Jacob L. 1993. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1982. Mutual knowledge and relevance in theories of comprehension. In: N.V. Smith (ed.) Mutual knowledge. London: Academic Press. Thomas, J.1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Widdowson, H.G. Meaning in Interaction. New York: Longman Publishers.

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Pragmatic Analysis of the Advertising Language. Abstract

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