CC BY
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LANGUAGE USED FOR COMMUNICATING MESSAGES IN PR AND ADVERTISING
Miranda Ostrosi
(Tirana, Albania)
The main aim of this paper is to throw light on how language is used along other mass media instruments to communicate messages in the PR and Advertising world nowadays. It gives a brief overview of various contributions and use of language definitions part of contemporary discussions, by highlighting the connection that exist between PR, advertising and language. The influence they have on one another has been as well elaborated to show how advertisements changed the concept of the language usage occasionally and become part of our lives by bringing together pieces of history, language and culture.
Keywords: advertising, communicating messages, language, PR.
1. Introduction
PR and Advertising are becoming the source of life for the mass media and they are directly influencing our language nowadays. Media can not function without the PR and mainly advertisements, but in the same way PR and advertisements can not really function without media. In the course of history advertisements have been the travellers who have brought pieces of language and culture and spread it worldwide. Nobody can point to the “first” advertisement, since forms of marketing have existed since ancient times. What we try to introduce in this work is the interaction between language, PR and advertisements, as well as the influences they have on each other.
In the process of communication there is a message to be sent to the people and all we have to do is to utter it, while in PR and advertising the whole purpose of the message is to affect the way the viewers think and act, more concretely to persuade them. When we see an ad that doesn’t appeal to us, it may be because the ad is not aimed at any of the groups we belong to. If we look at the specific case of Mc Donald’s idea to attract the youngest audience “the children”, we all know how hard or difficult it becomes to say no to your kid who is insisting on having an afternoon on the games shopping mall in your area. He was the target and he was
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successfully reached. There has actually been a long way before reaching to the target. The people who created this advertisement studied for a long time the favourite words and collocations of the children.
Advertisements are closely related to the linguistic features of the language and these features are in general very popular due to the purpose of the advertisement itself. The language slowly evolved with the advertisement. In the past we used to have only some slogans, a whole poem or a statement that brought the essence of the product, but nowadays we see as banner and billboard advertising are diminishing the usage of language.
2. Features and structures of advertising language.
2.1. Features
While trying to look at some typical features of advertising language in general, one should not be surprised to find out that in many advertisements these language features may appear to be largely absent. Advertisements which do not use traditional features to inform, attract and persuade may be generally described as being unconventional one.
Taking into consideration the above, we can easily identify some of these unconventional features:
■ Hyperbole or exaggeration can be one. It is often achieved by the use of adjectives and adverbs. A limited range of evaluative adjectives includes fresh, clean, new, white, real, great, soft, right, big, natural, slim, wholesome, improved.
■ Neologisms are another feature which may have novelty impact, e.g Beanz Meanz Heinz, Cookability, Tangoed, Wonderfuel. Long noun phrases characterized by the frequent use of pre and post modifiers for descriptions.
■ Short sentences are another feature which is used to create impact on the reader. This impact is especially clear at the beginning of a text, often using bold or large type for the “Headline” or “slogan” to capture the attention of the reader.
■Ambiguity is also common for the only reason that this may make a phrase memorable and re-readable. At the very first moment that we read an ambiguous phrase we tend to focus more on that.
■ Other words which come to be often used are the Weasel words. These are words which suggest a meaning without actually being specific. One type of the Weasel words are the open comparative: “Brown’s Boots Are Better” (posing the question “better than what”; another type is the
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bogus superlative: “Brown’s Boots are Best” (posing the question “related alongside what”; Use of Imperatives: “Buy Brown’s Boots Now! “Euphemisms: “Clean Round the Bend” for a toilet cleaner avoids comment on “unpleasant” things. The classic example is “B.O” for “body odour”
■ Avoidance of negatives (advertising normally doesn’t make use of the negative, thus emphasizing the positive aspect of a product - though see Marmite, Tango, Benetton, for whom it seems that all publicity is good)
■ Simple and Colloquial language, used to attract and appeal to ordinary people, though it is in fact quite complex and as a result ambiguous. “It ain’t half good”. Familiar language is another feature of the language of the advertisements. Here we can mention the use of second person pronouns so as to address an audience and suggest a friendly attitude toward everyone.
■ Present tense is most commonly used, though nostalgia is expressed by the simple Past Simple.
■ Vocabulary is most common, with the exception of technical vocabulary to emphasize the scientific aspects of a product which often comes as a complex noun phrase, i.e. “the new four wheel servo-assisted disc brakes”. What’s worth mentioning here is the repetition of the brand name and the slogan, both of which are usually memorable by virtue of alliteration, “finger of fudge”, “the best four by four by far”; rhyme, “mean machine”, “the cleanest clean it’s ever been”; rhythm, “drinka pinta milka day”; syntactic parallelism, “stay dry”, “stay happy”; or association, “fresh as a mountain stream”.
■ Humour - Everyone needs a little humour in their hectic lives and more often than before, advertiser try to inject some fun into their advertisements. Injecting humour into their advertisements does not mean that the ads are better than others. However, the smart play on words and careful consideration of the ad’s objectives, target audience and market standards, humour can help the advertisement increase effectiveness and widen its receptiveness. When using humour as a creative strategy, advertising firms agree that it increases audience attention, at least on the first few exposures to this form of persuasive communication.
■ Glamorization is probably the most common technique of all. By glamorizing things, in advertising everything is not what it seems. Things are treated as they are unique, as owing unique features, features which are hardly to be found in other things or objects. Under glamorization “Old” houses become charming, they become unique. “Small” houses 111
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become compact, bijou, or manageable. Houses on a busy road become convenient for transport. A cafe 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 server.
Finally there are some words which mirror potency and values, novelty and immediacy to a piece of copy. These words are free, now, suddenly, it’s here, improvement, amazing, announcing, quick, challenge, miracle, easy, revolutionary, magic, sensational, important development, offer, wanted, compare, startling, introducingl.
2.2. Structures
Clipping/abbreviation - An abbreviated word or phrase is eventually accepted as a word in its own right. The word flu for instance is heard far more often than influenza, prams more then perambulators, and bus more then omnibus. In order to acknowledge the clippings, the words ‘bus and ‘phone were sometimes associated by an apostrophe. Other clippings are gym, bike, advertisement, and more recently, blog (1999 from web blog). Clipping phrases or compounds can result in grammatical conversion/ structural shift. The adjectives floppy and mobile have become nouns as a result of floppy disc and mobile phone being clipped.
Acronyms - An acronym is a word whose letters are the first letters of other words. People often create a short word that means the same thing as a much longer phrase (set of words), to make it faster and shorter to say the long phrase. An abbreviated word must be pronounced as a word rather than just a list of letters. They are usually capitalized at first but some later appear as ordinary words in lower case. Technological examples include SCUBA( Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, 1952) and LASER (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation, 1960), Radar (Radar-Radio Detecting And Ranging). There are many acronyms as regards organizations’ names: OSCE, BE, NATO, etc.
Initialisms - An initialism is a word made from the first letters of each word in a phrase. Unlike acronyms, initialisms cannot be spoken as words: they are pronounced letter by letter. The VCR (Video Cassette recorder) has become obsolete since the introduction of DVDs ( Digital Versatile Disc) but these too are under threat as viewers record programmes onto the hard disk of their PVR (personal video recorder). As well as technology (html), initialisms are used for organizations (BBC). They save space in advertisements (fsh = full service history; wltm (would like to
1 www.putlearningfirst.com/language/1
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meet; gsoh = good sense of humour) and electronic communications (asl, imho). I can include more examples such as LOL (Laugh Out Loud), BRB (Be Right Back), J W (Just wondering), etc.
Affixation - Affixes, word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes (do, undo; way, subway) or follow, as suffixes (do, doer; way, wayward). They may be native (overdo, waywardness), Greek (hyperbole, thesis), or Latin (supersede, pediment). Modern technologists greatly favour the neo-Hellenic prefixes macro “long, large,” micro“ small,” para “alongside,” poly “many,” and the Latin mini “small,” with its antonym maxi2. The Internet era has popularized cyber “of computers or computer networks” and mega “vast.” An affix a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English- ness and pre-, or they may be either inflectional, like English plural-s and past tense - ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Other common affixes include post-, inter-, mega- and -ism. The abbreviation of electronic mail to email in the 1980s led to the formation of words like e-journal, e-dollar, e-ticket, e-tailer and e-commerce in the following decade.
Back Formation - Based on analogy, backformation, also called clipping, is a word formation process that shifts a word’s function from one category to another3. Which means it’s a functional shift: by clipping off a word’s suffix, the word’s function changes. If we take, for instance, the noun television and the verb televise, which entered into English when the Television was invented. First, the noun television was coined (from tele-, a prefix meaning at a distance, + vision, meaning to see), and then the suffix -ion was clipped off, giving a new word, the verb televise. With backformations, specifically verbs, the verb is created from the noun, which is the opposite of what we expect. Generally, -ion is added to verbs to create nouns, and not the other way around. So when we see, say, the word television, we automatically assume that it is made from the verb televise + ion, but in fact it’s not. It’s the other way around which means that the verb televise is made from the noun television. One has to know the history of the English language or has to invest in a dictionary that lists backformations in order to have the ability to tell if a given word is a backformation.
2 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/188048/English-language/74803/ Affixation
3 http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/8909-back-formation-english.html
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Compounding - Compounding is the process of forming new words by joining two existing ones together.4 The resulting compound may in this way, start life as a phrase, with a gap between the two words, before going through a hyphenated stage and finally being written as single word. Depending on the size of your computer, it may be a desk-top, a lap-top or a palmtop.
Blends - A blend is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. These parts are sometimes, but not always, morphemes. Blends deal with the action of abridging and then combining various lexemes in order to form a new word. However, more complicated and more difficult is the process of defining which words are true blends and which are not. The difficulty comes in determining which parts of a new word are “recoverable” (its root can be distinguished). There are many types of blends, based on the way they are formed. Most blends are formed when the beginning of one word is added to the end of the other. For instance, the word brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch, the word simulcast is a blend of simultaneous and broadcast, smog is a blend of smoke and fog. Blends are also formed when the beginnings of two words are combined. For instance, cyborg is a blend of cybernetic and organism. Two words are blended even around a common sequence of sounds. For instance, the word motel is a blend of motor and hotel, lupper from lunch and supper, brunch from breakfast and lunch. Multiple sounds from two component words are blended, while mostly preserving the sounds’ order.
Eponyms - An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named5. An individual who is referred to as eponymous is someone who gives his or her name to something. Another term for eponym is name giver. In contemporary English, the term self-titled is often used to mean eponymous in the case of a work with the same name as the person or persons who created it. Because proper nouns are capitalized in English, the usual default for eponyms is to capitalize the eponymous part of a term. The common-noun part is not capitalized. For example, in Parkinson disease (named after James Parkinson), Parkinson is capitalized, but disease is not. However, some eponymous adjectives are nowadays entered in many dictionaries as lowercase when they have evolved a common status, no longer deriving their meaning from the proper-noun origin. For instance, Herculean when referring to
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29
5 http://www.memidex.com/eponyms
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Hercules himself, but often herculean when referring to the figurative, generalized extension sense; and quixotic and diesel engine (lowercase only). American and British English spelling differences can occasionally apply to eponyms. For example, American style would typically be cesarean section, whereas British style would typically be caesarean section.
Conversion - Conversion is the derivational process whereby an item changes its word-class without the addition of an affix”6 Thus, when the noun ‘sign’ (1) shifts to the verb’sign(ed)’(2) without any change in the word form we can say this is a case of conversion. However, it does not mean that this process takes place in all the cases of homophones [March-and 1972:225].7 Sometimes, the connection has to do with coincidences or old etymological ties that have been lost. For instance, ‘mind’ (3 and 4) and ‘matter’ (5 and 6) are cases of this grammatical sameness without connection by conversion—the verbs have nothing to do today with their respective noun forms in terms of semantics (ibid:243). Conversion is particularly common in English because the basic form of nouns and verbs is identical in many cases [Aitchison 1989:160]8. According Cannon, despite the undetermined position in grammar, some scholars assert that conversion will become even more active in the future because it is a very easy way to create new words in English [Cannon 1985: 415]9.
Advertising language, together with other types of languages, such as journalism or religious oratory, can be classified under the heading of discourse of persuasion. In fact it is this characteristic which will permit us to distinguish them sharply from ordinary conversation. Nevertheless, because of its very specific goal to change the consumer’s mind and attitude towards the product on offer, advertising can be regarded as a separate member within the category of discourse of persuasion. Advertisers use various methods to achieve this goal, but the one I would like to concentrate on is that of lexical ambiguity. This type of ambiguity depends on the several possible readings of a single word. To influence people you have never met, to convince them to do what you ‘want them to do requires “magic”, and in order to get attention, to influence and to motivate readers to buy their goods and services, writers of advertising copy for print media use the magic of language. This is especially true for brief
6 Randolph Quirk, Geoffrey Leech and Sydney Greenbaum, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. 1987, p. 441
7 http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/31conversion.htm#1
8 http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Secondary-conversion.
9 ibid
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linguistic encounters, as the quickly passing pages of a magazine rarely allow for lengthy dwelling on a given page on point.
4. Advertising language: a “normal language” or “breaking the rules of normal language.
In order to have an answer for these questions, we must first have to know what is meant by “normal language”. The English language has evolved to have many different kinds of functionality, where each of these functions correspond to different s styles of use and to different situations. From the analytical view point, it seems to make most sense that “normal language” includes the variety of styles of English that mature speakers and readers use. If we make or undertake different studies or if we have a look around in literature on advertising, or if we navigate on Internet, it is not unusual to find claims that advertising breaks the rules of normal language and language use. However, from the perspective of a professional linguist, few of these claims seem to be really supportable. Not only the linguists but the people as well find different reasons to pay close attention to the way language is actually used in its speech community, for a wide range of communicative functions. Like many aspects of human being and human behaviour, 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. The language of advertising is, very positive and emphasizes why one product stands out in comparison to another. Advertising language may not always be “correct”. For example, comparatives are often used when no real comparison is made.
Language has a powerful influence over people and over their behaviour as well. This is true especially in the fields of advertising and marketing. The choice of language so as to convey specific messages with the intention of influencing people is vitally important. The advertising visual content and design have a huge impact on the consumer, but in fact it is the language which really helps people to identify a product and remember it.
The English language is known for its extensive vocabulary. There are languages which have may have one or only two words which carry a particular meaning, the case of the English language vocabulary, we may have five or six. Furthermore, the meanings of these five or six words may differ very slightly and in a very subtle way. What is important is to un-
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derstand the connotation of a word. Connotation is the additional idea or emotion that a word suggests to you, that is not part of its usual meaning. The example that I can give here is the word “armchair” which suggests comfort, whereas chair arouses no particular feelings. Actually it is the audience, which puts its own meaning into certain words. People interpret language in various ways. When the mass media reports news items, the marketing and advertising personnel have to consider the emotive power of the words they use. First of all, they make a decision about what to communicate and what to withhold. This is a very important step as it is the choice of the words which is decisive.
Taking compound words and using them as adjectives is a way in which advertisers adapt language to their own use. Gradually, these compounds often become widely used in normal situations. Examples of these compounds which have become part of the English language are: longer-lasting, top-quality, economy-size, feather-light, chocolate - flavoured. Above all, we know that the most important element is language because it is on the basis of language that we can bring about our thoughts or the perceptions we have about a certain concept. In the advertisement world the language reveals its real function, the function of delivering a message and persuading the man’s mind. This is the reason we cannot not divide the link between these two elements. This is like the connection between the computer and the individual, the computer is product of the individual, but both of them help to form a perfect whole which in this case is the message.
Advertising has always and still does attract business studies but it has recently provoked the interest of the language scholars because of its wide range of use in this direction and the results it brought us. In the course of time, new techniques have been evolved but on the basis of the language. If the language is good chosen the idea goes throw and beyond, the success is secure under the vest of the magnificent language10.
5. Conclusions
Language serves as the main link in the advertisement chain. A firm’s marketing activities are always aimed at a particular segment of the population and this is called the target market. Likewise, advertising is aimed at a particular group called the target audience. To be able to reach both the target market and the audience, language comes as the most powerful
10 Peter Sells and Sierra Gonzalez, The Language of Advertising, as checked in http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist34/index.htm
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tool alongside the mass media means. Language is the picture and counterpart of thoughts. The influence language has on PR and advertising can be the counterbalance they both have on changing and adopting certain language features and structures nowadays. We tried to elaborate how advertisements change the concept of the language usage occasionally and become part of our lives by bringing together pieces of history, technology, nature, language and culture. I personally believe that advertisements are part of the evolution if we see it from the diachronic point of view. We are on the way of building an international global language and advertisements are the main contribution in this direction.
References
1. Aitchison, J. 1989. Words in the Mind-An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
2. Cannon, G 1985. “Functional Shift in English.” Linguistics. 23.
3. Marchand, H. 1972. Studies in Syntax and Word-Formation, Mtinchen: Wilhem Fink.
4. Randolph Quirk, Geoffrey Leech and Sydney Greenbaum, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. 1987.
5. http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language71
6. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/188048/English-lan-guage/74803/Affixation
7. http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/8909-back-for-mation-english.html
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_%28linguistics%29
9. http://www.memidex.com/eponyms
10. http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/31conversion.htm#1
11. http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Secondary-conver-sion.
12. http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist34/index.htm
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