Analyzing the changing character and sophistication of TV advertisements in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

This article reports some preliminary findings ofa research project comparing the pragmatic and discoursal aspects of British and Chinese TV advertisements and raises some issues concerning the detailed study of textual inferencing. We briefly discuss the changing Situation in television advertizing in China in terms of the 'hard-sell/soft-seir distinction. We then discuss in detail two contrasting Chinese advertisements on the 'hard-sell-soft-seU' continuum in order to characterize what linguistic/pragmatic factors constitute the contrast. Previous authors have characterized soft-sell advertisements mainly by negative contrast with hard seil, but our work led us to try to capture more positive discriminatory features of soft seil. We suggest that, other things being equal, the more nonobvious inferencing which has to be done to understand an advertisement, the more likely it is to be thought of äs soft seil. However, most work on inference to date has tended to deal with brief, often constructed examples, and the comparison of patterns of inference in different texts raises difficult issues concerning how to characterize, and thus quantify, inferences. This prob lern is particularly acute in data which have linguistic and nonlinguistic Information in both the audio and visual reception channels. We do not have elegant Solutions to these problems, but hope that our detailed textual analyses willpromote more study in this difficult, but crucial, area. Our work also reveals an interesting new kind of repetition phenomenon, inference repetition. Our data shows that the same inference may be made at the same or different moment(s) in different reception channels, and that an inference in one channel can repeat a more direct Statement in another channel. This kind of inference repetition can then, in turn, Help to characterize the hard-sell/soft-sell Opposition.

10. Advertising as a Site of Language Contact

“…These titles make a broad range of more specialized studies of specific aspects of the language of advertising accessible to a broader audience. Specific aspects that have been explored include, but are by no means limited to, formal aspects (e.g., Bruthiaux, 1996;Rush, 1998;van Niekerk, 1999); stylistics (e.g., Gieszinger, 2001; Grunig, 1990); pragmatics (e.g., Schmidt, Shimura, Wang, & Jeong, 1995;Short, & Hu, 1997;Simpson, 2001;Tanaka, 1994); text-image relationships (e.g., Forceville, 1996;Gardner & Luchtenberg, 2000;Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996); and the communication of ideologies (e.g., Berger, 2000;Jhally, 1987;O'Barr, 1994). Despite the fact that the field is obviously well established, comparatively little attention has been paid to advertising language as a site of language contact, as, for instance, a perusal of the indexes of the above-mentioned textbooks indicates.…”

To Reason with Them or Tickle Them: Advertising Strategies in the Discourse of Persian Print Ads

“…Working within the tradition of critical discourse analysis, other analysts have explored the political and ideological significance of advertising discourse (Williamson, 1978;Kress, 1987;Kress and van Leeuwen, 1990) and from this perspective special attention has been given to the representation of gender in ads (Goffman, 1976;Barthel, 1988;Thornborrow, 1994). Finally, given the interactive and dynamic properties of advertising, and the importance of contextual factors on the processing and interpreting of ads, it is not surprising that this type of discourse has been investigated within the parameters of models in linguistic pragmatics (Lakoff, 1982;Geis, 1982;Coleman, 1983Coleman, , 1990Tanaka, 1994;Short and Hu, 1997).…”

Análisis lingüístico de un corpus de eslóganes y frases publicitarias de marcas comerciales.

“…En las últimas décadas, el lenguaje publicitario en general ha despertado mayor interés por parte de los lingüistas (Cook, 2001;Goddard, 1998;Hermerén, 1999;Myers, 1994Myers, , 1998Vestergaard y Schrøder, 1985). Al analizar las características específicas de este tipo de lenguaje, observamos que algunos autores se decantan por estudiar los aspectos formales (Bruthiaux, 1996;Rush, 1998;van Niekerk, 1999); la estilística (Gieszinger, 2001;Grunig, 1990); aspectos pragmáticos (Schmidt, Shimura, Wang, y Jeong, 1995;Short, y Hu, 1997;Simpson, 2001;Tanaka, 1994); las relaciones texto-imagen (Forceville, 1996;Gardner y Luchtenberg, 2000;Kress y Van Leeuwen, 1996); o la transmisión de una ideología (Berger, 2000;Jhally, 1987;O'Barr, 1994).…”