Foods Commercials in English-Speaking Media: Linguistic Study

 

 

 

 

 

 

Course Paper:

Foods Commercials in English-Speaking Media: Linguistic Study.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLAN

INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................3

CHAPTER 1. Commercial discourse in modern linguistic studies………………...6

1.1. Semantic aspect of the Advertising Language…...............................................6

1.2. Pragmatic aspect of the Advertising Language…..............................................8

Conclusions………….............................................................................................10

CHAPTER 2. Phonostylistic properties of foods commercials ………..................12

2.1. Phonostylistic means and devices....................................................................12

2.2. Vocabulary…………………………………………………………….……..13

2.3. Imagery............................................................................................................15

2.4. Syntax………………………………………………………………………..17

Conclusions.............................................................................................................20

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS.................................................................................22

BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................23

ILLUSTRATION SOURCES.................................................................................25

 

INTRODUCTION

 

In a sense, advertising began around 3200 BC when the Egyptian inscriptions of the names of kings on temples being built. Through centuries advertising is growing rapidly and it is a multibillion dollar industry nowadays. In many businesses, sales volume depends on the amount of advertising done. Manufacturers try to persuade people to buy their products. Firms use advertising to promote an "image" for their company. Businesses use advertising to gain new customers and increase sales.

This course paper focuses on the semantic and pragmatic properties of commercial texts advertising foods.

Food consumed to provide nutritional support for the body, so we can’t live without it. Most food has always been obtained through agriculture. Now it is traded and marketed on a global basis. The variety and availability of food is no longer restricted by the diversity of locally grown food or the limitations of the local growing season. Every producer needs to find his customer. Food marketing brings them together [12 p.501-503]. It is the chain of activities that brings food from “farm gate to plate”.

To do things right and understand secrets of successful advertising we need to study the combination of linguistic and communicative-pragmatic elements of the language in human communication.

However, the number of works devoted to the analysis of advertising language, is rather significant, though we witness advertising English is developing very fast. The reason is that advertising is very popular nowadays and a lot of people want to know about advertising language. An advertising practitioner might simply want to find clues to more successful advertising; a sociologist might be interested in its effect on the behavior and values of society; a psychologist might be interested in its effect on individual motivations. And there are many other possible approaches.

Topicality of the research is predetermined by the study of the influence of advertising, its ability to persuade and motivate the audience to act to buy, its ability to provide customer’s automatism behavior while choosing the product.

Advertising text as the type of specific pragmatic orientation continues to attract both native and foreign linguists, which is reflected in the growing number of studies on this phenomenon.

Despite many studies on the linguistic analysis of the advertising text only certain types were explained.

This course work was performed as part of communicative and pragmatic paradigm of the language communication learning. It is directed to study the features of communicative and pragmatic phenomena in human society, specially the usage of the laws in the advertising slogan.

This investigation is based on theoretical and specialized works of Russian and foreign linguists such as I.R. Galperin, Ronnie Cann , Angela Goddard, V. Grigoriev, Halperin I.P., Ilish B.A., Geoffrey Leech, John Austin and others served as a methodological basis of the given work.

The aim of this work is to identify pragmatic potential of epithest in the advertising food’s slogan.

Achieving of the above mentioned aim presupposes the following tasks are:

1) examination of the nature of advertising as a special form of communication;

2) interpretation of advertising slogans as the main element of pragmatic advertising text;

3) classification of the epithets used in advertising slogans;

4) identification of the potential pragmatic stylistic devices of epithets;

The object of the study is an epithet in the advertising text of foods commercials.

The subject of the analyses embraces semantic and pragmatic potential of epithets in the English language modern food commercial advertisements.

The material of the study is epithet learned by continuous sampling of the advertising slogans, published and printed in the Internet. Number of such units is about thirty.

This work is grounded on the following methods: a) semantic analysis, b) stylistic analysis, c) a pragmatic analysis, d) the classification method, and e) definitional-component analysis.

The scientific novelty of the paper lies in the complex approach to the linguistic analyses of foods commercials in modern English-speaking media, which for the first time combines semantic, pragmatic and stylistic perspectives.

The theoretical value of the research is that it contributes new data to the linguistic theory of commercial discourse, it shows the dominative rules of the foods commercial advertising.

The practical value lies in the ability to apply the results of the research on the university-based course of lexicology and in the practical copywriter work.

The structure of the course work includes Introduction, Two Chapters, Conclusions, Bibliography and Illustration Sources.

 

CHAPTER 1. COMMERCIAL DISCOURSE IN MODERN LINGUISTIC STUDIES.

1. Semantic aspect of the Advertising Language.

 

Semantics is the study of the meaning system of language and its approaches vary widely. In one view, meaning is the relationship between language and the external world (referential or denotative meaning). In another, it involves the mental state of the speaker, as reflected in a range of personal, emotive overtones (affective or connotative meaning) [2].

A close examination is made of the various word manipulations and arrangements, the choice of words, word order, denotative and connotative meanings of advertisement slots grounded on established English language code.

The idea is to find out how writers create awareness and to provide fuller understanding and appreciation of the texture, meaning and comprehension of the language employed. In advertisement, the choice of diction involves exceptional skills. This will surely help in finding the right words combination for a given situation. Wrong lexical choices will either inaccurately mar the purpose of communication or at best vaguely or partially convey the intended meaning. The most important factor in communication is the attainment of a point of understanding of the meaning. Wolf and Aurner (1996) listed three techniques of effective communicators as unity, coherence, and emphasis. Also, effective training in communication must be based on a solid educated foundation in English usage: vocabulary, punctuations, figures, and in writing craftsmanship (Stewart and others 1968). It is saying that to write messages that are clear and fluid, one must observe certain techniques and without the techniques, one’s writing may be misunderstood or confused by customer, so the product won’t be sold.

Precision and effectiveness in advertising depend on the careful usage of words. Words are used to convey meaning exactly and vividly to the audience. It is necessary to examine the language of advertising in terms of word meaning. Basically, meanings are of two kinds-denotative and connotative meaning. Denotative meaning is the literal or common dictionary meaning while connotative is the evaluative, inferred or emotional meaning. The denotations will be roughly the same for people who use the same dictionary but words have different connotations for different people. In addition, meanings are influenced by the context in which they are used, by the relationship between the sender and the receiver and by many other variables. Therefore, the denotation of a word is the explicit literal meaning while the connotation is the meaning with which it is associated. Advertisements that express meaning use word with wide extensions. The words often connote strength, reliability, perfection, notability, and other similar qualities.

One can say that the language of advertising is connotative. Let me consider the “Bournvita” advertisement and its connotations. It seeks to appeal to an audience which is expected to see the rich and delicious content of the beverage.

 

Bournvita is the delicious

refreshing, vitality giving food drink

ideal for the whole family. Bournvita 

hot or cold, can be drunk any time of the day.  

 

Noticing such words as delicious, refreshing, and vitality we see that the advertiser wants the audience to bear in mind that “Bournvita” is nutritious and could be taken any time of the day whether the weather is hot or cold. It is also for the young and the old, hence the invitation ‘ideal for the whole family`. The epithets depict “Bournvita” as a total vitality drink that contains all the important nutritional values: proteins, vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates. Because of this, it should be used by everybody.

Apart from the connotative and denotative meanings, there are also the other forms of meaning, such as the evocative meaning. Certain words, which have the ability to evoke images and f feelings, are deliberately used to influence the hearer’s attitude to what he listens to. Consider the following advertisement:

 

*** Nescafe jingle***

 

sun is up, I’ve got so many things to do...

but it's alright (it's ok) i have to taste it

it's gonna be a good day (be a good day)

 

chorus:

 

wake up (wake up) it's a beautiful morning...

get up (get up) cheer the sunshine near you...

wake up (wake up) it's just beautiful...

one good day coming up!!!!!!!!

 

*** Nescafe jingle***

 

In the above certain expressions like good day, beautiful morning, sunshine near you, it's just beautiful, one good day coming up - are imbued with greater meaning and evoke images and feelings. Advertisements depend a great deal on epithets and repetition for effect – good, beautiful morning started only with Nescafe. They evoke a vivid picture of what the advertiser wants to show and can cause positive feelings in the audience.

 

1.2. Pragmatic aspect of the advertising language

 

The pragmatics of advertising texts is concerned with their use in the acts of speech. The approach is based on the fact that an utterance is a linguistic unit, which performs a very important non-structural function - to serve as a unit of speech communication. Nowadays, the linguistic study of mass communication and advertising in particular, is concerned with pragmatic aspects of communication along with traditional structural and semantic aspects. The object of pragmatics, which is in our case regarded in its narrow sense, is the system of active language means, aimed at the mentality and will of the addressee. The final goal of pragmatics is to reveal the optimal system of linguistic determination of both social and individual human behavior. Therefore, the pragmatic function is that of influence, which includes the effect of speech, interaction, verbal management of human behavior, shaping social and individual human behavior via language. That function is very important for advertising, since its main goal is to create an impact on social and individual behavior. The pragmatic understanding is a number of procedures, in the course of which the participants of communication assign specific conventional properties to the slogans. These properties make up the power of a message, which is decoded by the addressee in the context of the following factors: grammatical and structural features of the utterance; paralinguistic characteristics (pictures, fonts, placement on the page, etc.); perception of the communicative situation (what is the situation around the addressee at the moment of perception); previously received information (knowledge and opinion) about the object and the addresser of communication; general knowledge. [10]

Approximately, we can single out at least four levels of the information process: creation and preparation of the message; expansion of the social information; involvement of the audience into the action of the communication system; assimilation and perception of the information. Each of these levels can be interpreted, on one hand, as an activity aimed at creation of the messages and their transmission through communication channels, and on the other hand, as an activity of the audience receiving and considering the information. [24. p.137]

The main and only goal of advertising is to make and convict the addressee buy the product or use the service advertised. A conviction is knowledge which became a motivation for action. If the motivation is strong enough to get the addressee to take the actual action, the influence is successful. This result is stimulated if the recipient needs and desires are considered when the text is being compiled. [24. p.93]. And therefore an advertisement has to be very argumentative and even aggressive, although subtle at the same time. That necessity conditions advertising and makes it a very distinctive linguistic and pragmatic type. The advertising text is a finalized act of speech with a defined formal (composition) and semantic (content) structure, including two principal aspects - informative and persuasive (voluntative). It serves as a communicative message, which has the pragmatic purpose of transmitting the information concerning the object of advertising, adequate to the author’s intention, which aims eventually at encouraging the recipient to take an action - to buy the product. The formal structure of an ad-text includes elements reflecting informative and persuasive features of advertising.

 

Conclusions

Advertisers tell the prospective consumer about the existence of their products and services. They try to persuade the consumer to buy through the use of language. The language of advertising suits the advertisers aims which are to inform, entice and motivate the audience to buy. The audience cannot believe the copywriter unless he convinces them of the truth in his copy. Believing the advertiser depends on whether he uses his language wisely. To achieve his aims, he must apply imaginative, original, and fresh language.

Therefore the novelty and freshness of advertising language is justified for the purpose of attracting people’s attention, winning their trust and swaying their thinking. Emotional connotative meaning which is mostly used by advertisers is connected with pleasantries. Epithets are linked with the images and features of the products.

As mentioned above, the functional and pragmatic aspects of general advertising are determined by a combination of information and motivation (persuasion). The specific character of advertising lies in the fact that the motivating (recruiting) function is closely linked with the informative one with a clear tendency for dominance of motivating elements in the communicative structure of the text.

 

CHAPTER 2. PHONOSTYLISTIC PROPERTIES OF FOODS COMMERCIALS.

 

2.1. Phonostylistic means and devices

 

It is obviously the case that speech sounds have acoustic properties which remind people of noises they encounter in the world; less obviously, they seem to have properties which people often interpret in terms of non-acoustic experiences, such as contrasts of size, movement, or brightness. All aspects of pronunciation, including vowels, consonants, syllables, and prosodic patterns (intonation, stress, and rhythm).With phonology, we are not so much listening to the acoustic properties of speech sounds as sensing how these sounds are distributed within words and sentences. A distinctive phonological pattern always carries a semantic implication. If we write; “Freshen-up with 7-Up”, the grammar of the text says not so much but due to the alliteration our mind catches the slogan and remembers it. In short, the similarity of sound helps better learning and recollecting information. The phonetic properties of the English sounds are an important source of special effects, which allow using alliteration.

In commercial advertising, the sound a product makes, and the emotion it is claimed to generate in the user, is often given by onomatopoetic expression: a smell of food or drink might evoke “M-m-m-m-m” or “Yummy”. [3, p.252].Brand names commonly use sound (or letter) symbolism, as the world of breakfast cereals crisply demonstrates, with its crunches, puffs, pops and smacks.

We can feel the rhythm in the slogan “A big delight in every bite”. Big-bite; delight-bite – it sounds like a song or a march. The [b]-sound intensifies the beat.

The use of rhyme in advertising is very efficient, since it provides for good memorability of the text (“Dare to compare”; “There's a lot of joy in Chips Ahoy!”). However, it is not frequently used for the obvious reason: it is very hard to make up a felicitous rhymed slogan which would retain all the other needed features (expressivity, argumentation, association, consideration of consumers¶ needs and desires). As a rule, rhymed slogans ensure success of the advertisement and contribute greatly to success of the product. Rhythm is not as infrequent as rhyme, since it is easier to create a rhythmic combination of sounds than a rhymed combination of words. Some of the rhythmic examples of ad-slogans are: “Help yourself to happiness” – Golden Corral; “Give the Cool Whip, Get the Love” - Cool Whip; “You deserve a break today.” - McDonald's. In the latter case the effect is attained also by means of semantic rhythm.

 

2.2. Vocabulary

 

Specific grammar features are inseparable part of slogans. Not only catching devices but also grammar can be means of attraction. If pronouns, capitalization and negatives have the right use, slogans can achieve high effectiveness.

Possessive and personal pronouns are used in advertising discourse more often than in other discourses. It is cause by the fact that these pronouns shorten distance between and advertising and recipient. The most powerful ones are pronouns “I”, “you” and “your” because they suggest personal relationship. The sender does not know who is a recipient. However, the recipient has to think the text is addressed only to him. Another often used pronoun in slogans is We. In English slogans this pronoun must be expressed explicitly only.

 

• I’m  lovin’ it! (McDonald’s)  
• Melts in your mouth not in your hands - M&Ms
• At work, rest and play, you get three great tastes in a Milky Way - Milky Way
• Don’t let hunger happen to you – Snickers
• Show’em you’re a tiger, Show’em what you can do, the taste of Tony’s Frosted Flakes, brings out the tiger in you, in you! - Frosted Flakes

 

Stylistic effects in advertising are often attained by means of graphetic devices. The symbols of a typeface may be combined into larger units of texts, such as words (which have a spoken language equivalent) and lines (which do not), paragraphs (which have a partial spoken equivalent) and pages (which do not). The visual effect of these larger blocks of text, moreover, is not readily predictable from the graphetic properties of individual letters. The complex interaction of typeface, type size, letter and line spacing, color, and other such variables combine to produce the dominant visual quality of the typeset text. Advertisements often go out of their ways to break standard typographic conventions. In fact, graphetic deviance as any other deviance is very likely to catch the reader’s attention, which is exactly what the advertiser needs. In advertising, various combinations of bold, italic, underlined letters and words, upper and lowercase, various fonts and lots of other means are used.

A noticeable present-day trend is the use of deviant spelling as a part of a tradename or an advertising campaign. The motivation for the distinctive spelling is to provide an unambiguous, identifiable product name which will not be confused with an ordinary word in the language. Capital letters are parts of graphology which is the study of writing system (Miššíková, 2003). This phenomenon is called capitalization. There are two types of it.

First one, initial capitalization, has emphatic effect because it looks like a headline. All words have an initial capital letter to point out meaning of every word. Full capitalization is used in advertising slogan for similar reason. If all letters in a slogan are capital, it is more probable we will mention it.

 

• “It’s the Real Thing”  – arguably Coca-Cola’s most enduring slogan of the many it has used
• ‘A Mars a Day helps you Work, Rest and Play’ – slogan used to advertise Mars Bars in the UK, from the 1970s onwards.
• ‘Don’t be Vague, Ask for Haig’ – from a Haig Whiskey advert from the 1930s onwards

 

Sometimes it is possible to use negatives with positive meaning. Firstly we can use two negatives which emphasize positive meaning of a statement as for example in slogan on Adidas: Impossible is nothing. However, in advertising slogans negatives are used sparingly because it is very important for a slogan to be positive.