CC BY
23Language. Text. Society (2008), Vol. 2, No. 1 - P. e55
© Behnam, Biook, and Davud Kuhi 2008 Research article
Veiled trails of threat in the language of advertisements: a discourse analysis of a military job advertisement
Biook Behnam1, Davud Kuhi2
1 Azarbaijan University of Tarbiat Moallem, Tabriz, Iran
E-mail: behnam_biook@yahoo.com
2 Islamic Azad University, Maragheh, Iran
Received: 1 May 2008 R^ng edtor Andrey G Kirillov Published online: 1 June 2008
3 Accepted: 15 May 2008 '
Abstract
The discourse employed in military job advertisements usually resorts to persuasive strategies which are absent in other job advertisements. Lack of public interest for military jobs, especially due to the potential risks inherent in them, obliges the sponsors and producers of such advertisements to create a pleasant atmosphere of the job awaiting the candidates. However, the political situation of the world we are living in sometimes influences the strategies and content of the discourse dominating these advertisements and instead of such a pleasant atmosphere, the portrayed picture becomes that of instability, fragility and insecurity. Threat replaces pleasure, and warning replaces invitation. The sample data analyzed in this paper is a representative of such a situation. The analysis has mainly resorted to pragmatic frameworks to describe the strategies used by the writer. Later, a wider interpretative framework has been used to highlight the fact that due to unstable international situation, military job advertisements may sometimes utilize a threatening discourse to oblige the readers to volunteer; otherwise, they should wait for the negative consequences of their negligence and reluctance.
This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Keywords
speech act; cooperative maxims; conversational implicature; IFD; face; FTA
For citation
Behnam, Biook, and Davud Kuhi. 2008. "Veiled trails of threat in the language of advertisements: a discourse analysis of a military job advertisement." Language. Text. Society 2 (1): e55-e72. https://ltsj.online/2008-02-1-behnam-kuhi. (Journal title at the time of publication: SamaraAltLinguo E-Journal.)
1. INTRODUCTION
In our everyday life, we are flooded with a vast number of advertisements. We are exposed to them from a variety of sources and in a variety of forms. We receive them from different channels as radio, TV, newspapers, etc. They advertise different things including home appliances, foods, clothes, perfumes and so on. Their main function is persuading the confused consumers to choose what is advertised from among lots of choices which are competing to win the race.
In a world one of whose serious problems is that of unemployment, the case of job advertisements can be an interesting one to investigate. These advertisements usually create a competitive atmosphere to challenge the capabilities of the candidates. They list a variety of academic, professional and personal capabilities so that they can opt for the most proficient. However, this cannot be the case with all jobs. Military jobs are among those least wanted jobs because of the potential risks they involve. Consequently, what is expected to be seen in such advertisements is supposed to be something attractive awaiting the candidates. You might find out something about exotic trips and adventures, high payments and an atmosphere appealing to the adventurous spirit of the youth.
The military job advertisement analyzed in this study, however, is not of the type we identified above. It is totally different from what we expect. It is full of warning, threat and references to the fragile international stability which our world is experiencing. The advertisement tries to persuade the reader that if he does not volunteer, he might, sooner or later, face a terrible situation. Though the locations mentioned in the advertisement might seem geographically so distant, the writer tries to bring them as close as possible to the potential candidate's private life.
The study has mainly used a pragmatic framework to describe and analyze the data. This framework is theoretically supported by the concepts of speech act theory, Grecian cooperative maxims and politeness theory. Hence, having reviewed some theoretical concepts related to this analysis, we will try to show how they have been used in analyzing and describing the sample text. Since interpretation of the overall function of such texts cannot be achieved by narrow discourse analytic approaches like the ones we mentioned (a pragmatic framework), we have, later, resorted to a wider framework to justify the variation we notice in this advertisement. In the discussion section of the research, we will discuss the necessity of studying such data in a broader context which can take into account not only the speaker/writer intentions but also the social and political exigencies which force the producers of military job advertisements to utilize the type of strategies discussed in the analysis section.
2. REVIEW OF RELATED THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Since the present study is generally based on a pragmatic orientation to the analysis of discourse, in what comes forth, we will review the theoretical foundation and define the key concepts that support the analytic component of the research.
2.1. Speech act theory
Speech act theory considers language as a tool which can be used not just to describe the world, but to perform actions: the focus is communicative acts performed through speech. What this trend offers to the analysis of discourse is a set of constitutive rules by which particular labeled speech actions can be defined. It is assumed that speakers and hearers share these rules and use the rules to produce and interpret a variety of actions. The particular action defined through the rules provides expectations for a next action, Thus, the coherence of discourse emerges on a local, action by action basis; the sequential relationship between actions are derived from the knowledge that we use to relate an utterance to an action. So, speech act approach to discourse considers coherence as the result of underlying mapping rules and sequencing rules that relate not the surface linguistic details of what is said, but the actions that have resulted from mapping rules. In fact, speech act approach to coherence is rule- centered. In Schiffrin's words (1994) it needs constitutive rules for the very definition of speech act; furthermore, it requires mapping rules to link an utterance to an act, and sequencing rules to link utterance-action correlations to one another. Then, coherence is the result of the application of rules.
John Austin and John Searle, two philosophers, developed speech act theory from the basic belief that language is used to perform actions. The fundamental focus of their studies was on how function and action are related to language. On any occasion, the action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts (Austin 1962): (a) Locutionary act which is the propositional meaning or basic literal meaning of the utterance which is conveyed by the particular words and structures which the utterance contains, (b) Illocutionary act which is the communicative force of the utterance, act performed by saying the locution, and (c) Perlocutionary act which is the consequential effect of an utterance, what is achieved. Of these three dimensions, the most discussed is illocutionary act. Indeed, the term 'speech act' is generally interpreted quite narrowly to mean only the illocutionary force of an utterance. The early categorization of utterances in terms of performatives and constatives depended on the fact that the former can be judged on the basis of meeting certain felicity conditions, whereas the latter can be judged on the basis of being true or false. Austin [ibid] considered felicity condition as circumstances in which the words were uttered; these circumstances should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether physical or mental, or even acts of uttering further words.
Provided that these conditions are observed, a specific performative can be "happy". In the sample data, we will notice that specific utterances of the advertisement considered as warning enjoy the required felicity conditions for performing the act of warning and/or threatening.
Moreover, in the present discussion, what is significant is the distinction which is usually made between direct speech acts and indirect speech acts. In fact Searle (1979) suggests a kind of trade-off between the contribution of textual and contextual information to our identification of speech acts: it is possible to perform an act "without invoking an explicit illocutionary force-indicating device where the context and the utterance make it clear that the essential condition is satisfied" (68). In other words, sometimes there is no one-to-one relationship between a structure and function and one act is performed by way of another: these are called indirect speech act. An important issue related to indirect speech acts is how we do more than one thing at once with our words (i.e. the multiple functions of an utterance). Then an indirect speech act is defined as "an utterance in which one illocutionary act (a primary act) is performed by the way of the performance of another act (a literal act)" (Schiffrin 1994, 59). What makes hearers, then, to interpret indirect speech acts is their reliance upon their knowledge of speech acts, along with general principles of cooperative conversations (see section 2.2), mutually shared factual information, and a general ability to draw inferences. In the data analysis section, we have provided examples of these types of acts. The writer of the advertisement has started his text by some questions, which unlike their interrogative structural features, act as threats. In these threats we do not see any obvious device (the Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, or IFD) for indicating the illocutionary force.
2.2. Cooperative maxims and conversational implicatures
Pragmatics, the realm in which concepts like cooperative maxims and implicature are discussed, has a very different definition of meaning from so called contextual approaches. The meaning problem is not addressed by reference to social and cultural meaning. The focus is on individual, intention-based meaning that could supplement the logical, propositional, and conventional meanings representable through a linguistic code. Though there is a sense of context-boundedness; this context is not a situational or cultural one. The assumption is that speaker and hearer bring to each and every occasion of speaking some cooperative maxims. Consequently, discourse is seen as a chain of inferential relationships whose links are based in relationships that arise from the operation of maxims of cooperation as they apply across utterances.
Some of the persuasive strategies the writer of the advertisement analyzed in this study has resorted to can be identified by reference to the concept of conversational implicatures. Grice (1975) made a distinction between two types of implicatures and divided them into two main categories: Conventional implicatures which posses a semantic nature and non-conventional (conversational) implicatures which have a pragmatic nature and are related to what Grice called cooperative maxims (quality, quantity, relevance and manner). They are conventionally defined as (ibid.):
Quantity: make you contribution as informative as is required and do not make your contribution more informative than is required
Quality: do not say what you believe to be false and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence Relevance: be relevant
Manner: be perspicuous
As mentioned above, conversational implicatures can be explained by relating them to cooperative maxims and in Grice's words (ibid.) the conversational maxims and the conversational implicatures connected with them are specially connected with the particular purpose that talk is adapted to serve and is primarily adapted to serve.
Grice (ibid.) categorized the connection between the CP and maxims, on the one hand, and conversational implicature on the other into different categories claiming that a participant in a talk exchange may fail to fulfill a maxim in various ways (46):
1. He may quietly and unostentatiously VIOLATE a maxim; if so, in some cases he will be liable to mislead.
2. He may OPT OUT from the operation both of the maxims and of the CP; he may say, indicate or allow it to become plain that he is unwilling to cooperate in the way the maxim requires. He may say, for example, I cannot say more; my lips are sealed.
3. He may be faced by a CLASH: He may be unable, for example to fulfill the first maxim of Quantity without violating the second maxim of Quality.
4. He may FLOUT a maxim; that is, he may BLATANTLY fail to fulfill it. On the assumption that the speaker is able to fulfill the maxim and to do so without violating another maxim (because of a clash), is not opting out, and is not, in view of the blatancy of his performance, trying to mislead, the hearer is faced with a minor problem: How can his saying what he did say be reconciled with the supposition that he is observing the overall CP? This situation is one that characteristically gives rise to a conversational implicature; and when a conversational implicature is generated in this way, we shall say that a maxim is being EXPLOITED.
In the data analysis section, we have argued that the strategies to persuade the readers to volunteer for the military job are related to VIOLATING the cooperative maxims since the writer attempts to mislead the reader.
2.3. The notion of face
Politeness is the expression of the speakers' intention to mitigate face threats carried by certain face threatening acts toward another (Mills 2003, 6). Being polite therefore consists of attempting to save face for another. Politeness theory states that some speech acts threaten others' face needs. First formulated in 1987 by Penelope Brown and Stephan Levinson, politeness theory has since expanded academia's perception of politeness and has influenced almost all of the theoretical and analytical work in this field (ibid., 57).
In 1967, Erving Goffman published the article "On face Work" where he first created the term "face". He discusses face in reference to how people present themselves in social situations and that our entire reality is constructed through our social interactions.
In any society, whenever the physical possibility of spoken interaction arises, it seems that a system of practices, conventions, and procedural rules come into play which functions as a means of guiding and organizing the flow of messages. An understanding will prevail as to when and where it will be permissible to initiate talk among whom, and by means of what topics of conversation (Goffman 1967).
This leads into Goffman: Face is a mask that changes depending on the audience and the social interaction (ibid.). Face is maintained by the audience not by the speaker. We strive to maintain the face we have created in social situations. Face is broken down by Goffman into two different categories: positive face (the desire of being seen as a good human being) and negative face (the desire to remain autonomous). Goffman argues that there is a limited amount of strategies to maintain face. Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that a face threatening (FTA) act often requires a mitigating statement or some sort of politeness, or the line of communication will break.
The most important tenet of Brown and Levinson's original text on politeness theory is that we change our language based on the hearer and thus our strategies for compliance gaining change depending on the audience. In every day life, we design messages that protect face and achieve other goals as well. Hence, politeness is the expression of the speaker's intentions to mitigate face threats carried by certain face threatening acts toward another.
Brown and Levinson began with the idea of 'model persons', rational agents who think strategically and are conscious of their language choices. This influenced Brown and Levinson when examining Goffman's version of face, where they agreed that rational agents have both positive and negative face. Simply put, they believe that model persons want to maintain others' face, but nevertheless are often forced to commit face threatening acts. Thus, politeness strategies are developed in order to formulate messages in order to save the addressee's face when face threatening acts are inevitable or desired.
Face needs are thought of as the desire to be appreciated and protected. These needs are broken down into two different categories: the desire to be liked and appreciated (positive face) and the desire to be autonomous and not to infringe on the other person (negative face). Therefore, positive politeness is designed to meet the face needs by performing an action like complementing or showing concern for another person whereas negative politeness is designed to protect the other person when negative face needs are threatened. Thus, there are different strategies to handle face threatening acts and these strategies are put into a hierarchy of effectiveness.
Brown and Levinson outline four main types of politeness strategies: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness, and off-the-record or indirect strategy. First, bald on record strategies do not attempt to minimize the threat to the hearer's face. This strategy is most often utilized by speakers who closely know their audience. With the bald on record strategies there is a direct possibility that the audience will be shocked or embarrassed by the strategy. The second strategy is positive politeness and this strategy attempts to minimize the threat to the hearers face. This strategy is most commonly used in situations where the audience knows each other fairly well. Quite often hedging and attempts to avoid conflict are used. The third strategy is negative politeness which presumes that the speaker will be imposing on the listener. The potential for awkwardness or embarrassment is greater than in bald on record strategies and positive politeness strategies. Negative face is the desire to remain autonomous. The final politeness strategy outlined by Brown and Levinson is the indirect strategy. This strategy uses indirect language and removes the speaker from the potential to being imposing.
Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that speakers take three main variables into account when deciding how to word a face-threatening utterance such as a request or challenge:
5. The power differential between hearer and the speaker (that is, amount of equality or inequality, labeled P).
17. The distance-closeness between them (labeled D).
18. The degree of imposition of the content of the utterance (labeled R)
They maintain that, other things being equal, the greater the power differential, the greater the distance and the greater the imposition, the more careful and more direct the speaker will be.
Some scholars have also looked at politeness phenomenon from a Grecian perspective of the theory of conversation. Grice's (1975) theory of conversation, and in particular his view that conversation is governed by a set of norms, pointed to the importance of investigating the social regularities which arise through and are reflected in communicative interaction. On the basis of this assumption, Leech (1983) maintains that the 'Politeness Principle' is a necessary supplement to Grice's Co-operative Principle, arguing that people often break the Co-operative Principle for 'politeness' reasons. In other words, "to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place" (Leech 1983, 82). Leech proposes a set of 'politeness maxims', such as the 'modesty maxim' and the 'agreement maxim', which operate in conjunction with the co-operative maxims. They are worded as 'rules' (for example, minimize praise of self, maximize dispraise of self, minimize disagreement between self and other, maximize agreement between self and other), but in fact, they aim to describe the interactional principles that underlie language use.
The politeness system theory advocated by Scollon and Scollon (1995) is also noteworthy in this field. They observe three politeness systems: the deference politeness system, the solidarity politeness system and the hierarchical politeness system. The distinction of the three systems is mainly based on whether there exist power differences (+P or -P) and on the social distance between the interlocutors (+D or-D). The deference politeness system is one in which participants are considered to be equals or near equals but treat each other at a distance (e.g. classmates). In a solidarity politeness system, the speakers may feel neither power difference nor social distance between them (e.g. friends). The hierarchical politeness system may be widely recognized among companies, government and educational organizations, in which the speakers resort to different politeness strategies: the 'higher' use involvement politeness strategies and the 'lower' use independence politeness strategies.
2.3.1. Face threatening acts (FTAs): Where do threats come from?
As mentioned above, politeness consists of attempting to save face for another. Brown and Levinson (ibid.) highlight the idea of 'model persons' as rational agents who think strategically and are conscious of their language choices. This influenced Brown and Levinson when examining Goffman's version of face, where they agreed that rational agents have both positive and negative face. Simply put, they believe that model persons want to maintain others' face, but nevertheless are often forced to commit face threatening acts. Thus, politeness strategies are developed in order to formulate messages in order to save the hearer's face when face threatening acts are inevitable or desired. In other words, face threatening acts (FTAs) are behaviours that run contrary to the face needs of senders and/or receivers. For instance,
communicative acts such as insults or criticisms can threaten receiver's positive face by conveying disapproval, while requests for favors can threaten receiver's negative face by constraining receiver's behaviours and imposing on their autonomy. Other behaviours can threaten sender's own face needs; a confession of wrongdoing can threaten sender's positive face because it may elicit disapproval from others, while a promise of help can threaten sender's negative face by obliging him/her to engage in certain behaviours in the future. FTAs are often linguistic in form (e.g., criticism, request, apologies), although Trees and Manusov (1998) examined the face threatening characteristics of nonverbal behavior. Politeness theory originally assumed that positive and negative face are mutually exclusive, in that a given communicative act threatens only one and only one type of face. Empirical research has challenged this notion, however, demonstrating that some acts threaten both types of face simultaneously (Penman 1990; Wilson et al. 1991).
2.3.2. Facework strategies
Senders concerned about the potential face threats inherent in their messages often engage in various redressive actions designed to mitigate such threats. Politeness theory elucidates five forms of "facework" or super-ordinate strategies by which senders can mitigate threats they perceive their messages will have to face needs of themselves and their receivers. The five strategies are theorized to be hierarchically ordered on their degree of politeness, or the extent to which they mitigate face threats (Leech 1983).
The least polite strategy is to use a bald-on-record statement in which the message is encoded as directly as possible, with no attempt to mitigate potential face threats. The next strategy is known as positive politeness and involves crafting the message to minimize threats to receiver's face. Closely related is the next strategy, negative politeness, which involves formulating the message to minimize threats to receiver's face. The fourth strategy is to make one's statement off-the-record, which means that the message is implied but never explicitly stated. The last strategy in politeness theory is simply to forego the FTA altogether. This would be employed when the potential face threats of a message outweigh the benefits of it to such a degree that the FTA is simply not worth articulating.
3. THE PURPOSE OF THE PRESENT STUDY
Diversion of the data used in this study—a military job advertisement—from the established content and strategic features of more familiar job advertisements and adopting an unexpected threatening tone were the main forces driving this research to answer the following questions:
1. Why does the writer of this advertisement violate the established criteria of content
choice in the production of this text?
2. What discursive strategies does the writer opt for to achieve the intended purposes?
3. How does the writer keep the main function of the text as an advertisement while
violating the established criteria of content choice?
To answer these questions, the study has gone through two main stages: (a) a descriptive phase to answer questions 2 and 3 and (b) an interpretive phase to answer question 1.
4. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
The writer starts the advertisement by asking some questions. Let's see how the structures that carry the formal features of questions can fulfill a totally different function- threat:
Will Russian tanks roar across the plains of Germany?
Will crises erupt somewhere so remote we all have to scour maps to find out where it is?
Will one of our NATO allies call for moral support on its borders?
Will we be asked to join an international peace-keeping force to separate the sides in a civil
war?
Here, we should remind you of the distinction between literal acts and a primary act (corresponding to the distinction between propositional meaning/Locutionary act and illocutionary act) which was discussed in section 2.1. The literal acts performed by these utterances are questioning, whereas the primary act is that of threatening. In other words, what carries the formal properties of a question acts as a threat since it is possible to perform an act "without invoking an explicit illocutionary force-indicating device where the context and the utterance make it clear that the essential condition is satisfied." Questions have been utilized as appropriate "redressive actions" to hide the intentions of the writer who does not want to sound threatening. What makes us interpret these questions is the atmosphere which is created by these questions. The overall function of the advertisement is to persuade the readers to volunteer for the job being advertised. Detaching the beginning part of which includes some questions reveals on the writer's first attempts to create the atmosphere of anxiety. This anxiety can be furthered by words and expressions which are scattered among the questions:
Russian tanks
crises
moral support on its borders
civil war
They all mention and remind the reader of possible wars, conflicts, civil wars and clashes. Certainly, the writer of the advertisement does not seek any yes/no answer to these questions (though the common structural feature of the utterances is that they are all yes/no questions); rather, what the writer aims is to create a sense of uncertainty about the stability of peace all over the world. There are no IFDs (Illocutionary Force Indicating Device) to signal the force of threat in these utterances; that is why we categorize them as indirect speech acts. Four questions which initiate the text have a unitary function: threatening the reader, making the reader anxious and worried.
Whether the writer achieves his goals or not needs reference to the felicity conditions required for the 'happiness' of these acts. As mentioned in the introduction of this article,
analyzing the felicity conditions of these acts necessitates a wider analysis of social and political situation in which the advertisement was produced, but this is out of the scope of the descriptive phase of this study.
At the very beginning of the advertisement the writer exposes the reader to a list of questions that might cause any reader to feel that the world we live in is moving on the verge of possible wars and clashes. From a speech act taxonomy point of view none of these questions fulfill the familiar functions of questions. In fact the writer wants to make sure the reader has been trapped by the fear he wants to produce. As you notice, from a functional point of view these four questions act as threats. They warn the reader of things which has not happened yet, but rejecting the job offered in this ad might hasten their occurrence. To make sure the questions have acted as they were to the writer continues as:
Frankly your guess is as good as ours.
The world is so unstable it could go critical at any time without so much as a warning light.
This piece of text can be discussed from both speech act point of view and a pragmatic point of view. Considering the issue from a speech act approach, we can discuss the coherence which resides in the relationship between this part and the preceding part (four questions). As discussed in the theoretical background of the study, the particular action defined through the rules provides expectations for a next action. Thus, the coherence of discourse emerges on a local, action by action basis; the sequential relationships between actions are derived from the knowledge that we use to relate an utterance to an action. The shared knowledge of the rules of mapping between the writer and the reader has convinced the writer that the first four questions have successfully been interpreted as acts of threat. That is why we can notice a sharp shift from indirect speech acts to direct ones. The sentence "Frankly your guess is as good as ours." appreciates the readers' interpretation of the writer's intended meaning. However, since the sentence carries some deictic expressions as yours and ours, the writer prefers to be as direct as possible. This justifies the use of the next sentence:
The world is so unstable it could go critical at any time without so much as a warning light.
Looking from a pragmatic angle, the first sentence can also be considered as a violation from quality maxim. The writer takes for granted that his threat has met the felicity condition. We include this as a VIOLATION because the writer attempts to mislead the reader. "He may quietly and unostentatiously VIOLATE a maxim; if so, in some cases he will be liable to mislead." His conclusion is so quiet and silent without providing any visible indices between the questions and the following sentences. Even if you are indifferent to the threats hidden in the questions, you must follow the writer's intentions as he has planned. This deliberate gap which the writer tries to represent as a simple implicature is not that simple. We cannot include this in the 4th category discussed in section 2.2 and call it flouting. We had better treat it as a violation because of the ill-intentions to mislead the naive reader.
The geographical distance which might bring some relaxation to the frightened reader does not escape from the sharp eyes of the writer. He continues:
This is why we have made the Army much more mobile.
And probably he means these geographically remote problems are our problems. They can approach you if you do not go and stop them. If you and your families want to live in peace and quiet, enemy must be blocked somewhere far from us. Do not let it come nearer. The writer is fully aware of his violation and brings some more justification by this sentence.
You are not the first brave volunteer. This is what the writer wants to assert. In order to relive you temporarily from the fear which has occupied all your cells, he continues as:
Now we need another 900young officers whom these men will follow, if necessary to the ends
of the earth.
Looking from a pragmatic perspective adding the word another in this sentence is clearly exploiting the quality maxim to create a conversational implicature (refer to item 4 in section 2.2). However, this flouting is discoursally meaningful since it implies that you will join a group which hurried to stop the threat before you. Therefore, what is implied is that the problem and threat outlined before is so real that before you some other officers have decided to join the mobile section of the army.
There might be a small group among the readers who are not shocked and trapped by these clever attempts, so they need stronger shocks. If you are such a reader then:
You may well argue that your joining the Army would not have saved one life in Afghanistan.
We go further, it might not save anyone's life, including your own.
The interesting point is the way the writer plays a direct-indirect game of speech acts in this corpus. Indirectness is replaced by directness when he feels that indirectness might lead to forgetfulness. In the extract above, we can clearly notice this shift which is so strong that it even threatens the individual existence of the reader. That is to say your existence in England might depend on the existence of a fellow in Afghanistan. Then we can feel a mild and silent shift to indirectness:
On the other hand, it might.
It might, if enough like-minded men join with you, help to prevent a nuclear war.
Some hopes?
Perhaps. But the alternative is no hope at all.
Since the purpose is persuading the reader, this threat and fear is sometimes mixed with weak rays of hope.
As mentioned before, unlike other military job ads, this one does not offer anything interesting awaiting you in the training and trips. The following sentences just remind you of the harsh opportunities waiting for you in the places you will visit:
...you will rehearse battle tactics in Germany.
Confront heat in Cyprus, Belize or Hong Kong. And a heat of a different sort in Northern Ireland.
Occasionally, you may be asked to clamber into a VC10 on the way to, well, somewhere like monitoring a ceasefire in Rhodesia.
But more often, the worst enemy your men will face will be boredom, when it will take all your skills as a teacher and manager to motivate them.
The gloomy and harsh situation which is predicted here is another shift to indirectly address the reader. Variety which is obvious in the choice of geographical names accompanied by words and expressions as battle tactics, heat, ceasefire, enemy, boredom are intended to rub the reader of any time to recollect his concentration and think logically about the forced necessity. The reader is under fire again, but as an ongoing strategy, the writer reminds you of reasons for tolerance:
Then it will be difficult to remember that you are still protecting your country and all you love most.
Pragmatically, there is another conversational implicature here. The maxim of relevance is exploited in this case to create the conversational implicature. (category 4, section 2.2).
Taking for granted that you are convinced, the writer feels no necessity to ask you whether you are ready to join or not. One of the most obvious and humiliating cases of the violation (category 1, section 2.2) occurs when the writer continues by asking you about the length of time you want to serve in army. The maxim of relevance is violated as:
The question is, are you prepared to take the job on for three years or longer?
And as a careful reader you wish to shout here and say, "Hey! You forgot to ask me whether I am ready to join or not? Why are you asking me about the time then?"
But he won't listen because his only concern is to remind you of the painful experience waiting for you. He is well-aware of this rash violation, so before you start criticizing him for the underestimation of the readers' intelligence, he moves towards the explicit and direct side of the threat:
Women won't send you white feathers and children won't ask what you did in the war.
If you are so stubborn to be defeated by such a critical situation in the world, you might be accused of something which can move any responsible man. Reluctance from the readers' side can receive a sort of criticism no human being is willing to receive:
All we ask is that every young man at least takes the question seriously and answers it to the satisfaction of his own conscience.
This criticism does not carry the IFDs of threat, but from the view point of the type of coherence which is produced by the sequencing of acts, we can call it another act of threat; that is, if you do not volunteer, we can deny your humanity. What is different from the previous threats in the data is the tool used for threatening. If you are not afraid of what happens in the world, and the danger that can knock you own door, at least be responsible to you own conscience.
By the way, if neither this global uncertainty nor your human conscience obliges you to join the army and you are still undecided:
...write to Major John Floyd, Army officer Entry, Department A12, Lansdowne House,
Berkeley Square, London W1X6AA.
Tell him your date of birth, your educational qualifications and why you want to join us.
Two obvious and of course deliberate deviations (of violation type) from cooperative principles can be noticed here: One, the relevance of introducing yourself to the army in detail while you do not want to join (maxim of relevance). Maybe they want to embarrass you by introducing yourself as one of those who do not have human conscience to defend their country. Second, by violating the quality principle and saying tell...why you want to join us while you are one of those who have decided to know more before joining. This is how the things work in this sample!
5. DISCUSSION
In its simplest terms, politeness consists of the recognition of the listener and his or her rights in the situation (Spolsky 1998). A 'model person' conscious of his language choices is usually careful not to impose face threats to his addressee(s). Senders concerned about the potential face threats inherent in their messages often engage in various redressive actions to mitigate such threats. The military job advertisement analyzed above is a good example of such redressive actions or strategies. In section 2.3.2 we outlined the major facework strategies discussed in politeness theory. Regardless of where in that categorization we can include the strategies utilized in this data, the present study reveals how utilizing indirect speech acts and violating cooperative maxims can act as redressive actions to, hide, mitigate and lessen the inherent threat in the message. The writer of the advertisement understands the emergency that lies in the context. The nation needs more soldiers to defend its interests all over the world. Threat is an obligation since it is the best strategy to persuade the negligent reader. On the other hand, he does not want to infringe the readers' territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction, to freedom of action and freedom from imposition. Between these two forces, the best choice is opting for politeness strategies, i.e., the herculean task of being both polite and threatening. The writer is caught between the desire to achieve his goals and the desire to avoid infringing his audience's face. So, he plans his actions in a way to redress his audience's face wants. This is where he resorts to implicatures and indirect speech acts.
5.1. Necessity of a wider interpretative framework
Though the main devices we have used in the analysis belong to a pragmatic approach to the study of discourse, a bird's eye view to the intentions of the writer of this advertisement can situate it in a broader sociopolitical context. In other words, we have used speech act theory and Grecian cooperative maxims as the main devices of analysis; however, due to their narrow focus on the nature of discourse, we need to resort to broader approaches that tell us something more about the socio-cultural context in which language is embedded (the wider felicity conditions for the happiness of the acts). As Schiffrin (1994) states the origin of an approach provides different theoretical and meta-theoretical premises that continue to influence assumptions, concepts, and methods. Speech act theory and Grecian pragmatics are approaches originated in philosophy. In the analytic phase of the study, they provided us with invaluable devices to justify the writer's intentions. Other approaches to discourse downplay the role of speaker intention by constructing more sociogenic explanation of human behavior and viewing human behavior as part of the interactive construction of meaning. However, as we come to interpret this sample in a wider sociopolitical framework, the early devices we used for analysis are doomed to failure. What we need then is an approach (or some approaches) to discourse which require a great deal of social, cultural and even personal information about the interlocutors. Speech act theory and Grecian pragmatics assume an idealized speaker/hearer whose specific social, cultural, or personal characteristics do not enter into participant strategies for building text at all. A comprehensive framework for the interpretation of the strategies adopted by the producer of this text is the one which studies not only the acts of communication but also the wider communicative events and situations. We need to say who the participant of this interaction are, where they are living, when and in what conditions this text was produced, etc. (the questions which are not answerable by reference to a pragmatic approach per se).
Furthermore, in order to interpret the sample data, we need a framework with a sociolinguistic origin so that we can justify the different conception of language embodied. We need a framework which includes assumptions about the degree to which language is designed for communicative purposes. To be specific, we need to interpret this data in a framework which views communicative meaning as inherently contextualized and contextualizing.
We need a framework which goes beyond the inferential model of communication and defines communication in terms of interactional model, one which tries to explore the situated nature of the behavior. This suggests that what is communicated is inherently situated, and often situated in different ways for different people.
One such approach can be interactional sociolinguistics: a framework which is based in anthropology, sociology and linguistics, and shares the concerns of all three fields with culture, society and language. The contribution to interactional sociolinguistics made by Gumperz (1971) provides an understanding of how people may share grammatical knowledge of a language, but differently contextualize what is said- such that very different messages are produced and understood. And the contribution made by Goffman provides a description of how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life, and how it reflects, and adds, meaning and structure in those circumstances.
Consequently, situating the analyzed data in such a broad framework obliges us to end our discussion by references to the social and political exigencies that contribute to the production of such a discourse.
Obviously, in this advertisement, there is a variation from the norms dominant in military job advertisements with which we are familiar. This variation which is discoursally represented by threatening can reveal us lots of things about the unstable and insecure feelings which dominate our world because of the tensions and conflicts all around the world. The reader of this advertisement might feel a type of distance and detachment from the violent scenes of these conflicts and avoid joining an international military coalition to interfere and maintain the national benefits of his own country. This tells us lots of things about the social, political, economic and cultural status of the receivers of this advertisement. They live in a place which is detached, even geographically, from the rest of the world. Wars and conflicts pervasive all over the world do not worry him. They are in far, unknown spots of the world (in Afghanistan, in Rhodesia, etc.). On the other hand, the sponsor of this advertisement is an army which belongs to a government whose thirst to dominate and expand its territories never ends. It seeks benefits even in the places which are unknown to the nation. This government competes with some other superpowers all over the world to secure its share of what is going to be occupied and possessed.
What can bring these two different worlds together and fill the deep gap between a government with never-ending desires to posses and occupy and a forgetful, negligent, and maybe tired of long history of colonization and adventure? The atmosphere of fear and instability created in this advertisement has the function of creating such urgency among the readers and persuade them that their national security and stability, the comfort of their family and even their personal security depend on their active participation in the military missions in different corners of the world.
The reader of the present study might be familiar with such a discourse in the present time. We live in a world which has changed to be a dangerous place. Catastrophic wars threaten the inhabitants of our planet. Governments need soldiers to run the wheels of this cruel machine, while people do not want to kill and/or be killed. We still do not want to believe that we must guarantee our national benefits in an imaginary distance. But, governments are forcing us to believe the story. In this never-ending conflict between the governments and nations, military job advertisements can be used as a tool to fill our hearts with anxiety and fear.
6. CONCLUSION
Although a shift in framework sometimes leads to a shift in issue and data, there are some phenomena that can be addressed through different frameworks. We can utilize different approaches to explore the same phenomenon. Any specific analysis will explore a specific aspect of that phenomenon, but overall utilizing different frameworks jointly contributes to a deeper understanding. After all, we should not forget that, beside all differences, approaches to discourse analysis share a single set of underlying principles.
On the basis of what we did in this paper, the analysis carried out can be called a "layered" one since it has utilized diverse devices to analyze and interpret the data. First, through a pragmatic approach, we described the data in terms of writer's intentions and then we situated
the data in a wider context which could explain the choices made by the writer of this advertisement.
Appendix
Data Source: (Collett, Dickenson, Pearce and Partners Ltd Advertising)
Will Russian tanks roar across the plains of Germany?
Will crises erupt somewhere so remote we all have to scour maps to find out where it is? Will one of our NATO allies call for moral support on its borders?
Will we be asked to join an international peace-keeping force to separate the sides in a civil war? Frankly your guess is as good as ours.
The world is so unstable it could go critical at any time without so much as a warning light. This is why we have made the Army much more mobile.
And we always try to recruit the type of young man who can add calmness and good humor to a tense situation.
Now we need another 900 young Officers whom these men will follow, if necessary to the ends of the earth.
A job with no guarantee of success
You may well argue that your joining the Army would not have saved one life in Afghanistan. We go further, it might not save anyone's life, including your own. On the other hand, it might.
It might, if enough like-minded men join with you, help to prevent a nuclear war.
And it might, just might, hold the world together long enough for the powers of freedom and sweet
reasonableness to prevail.
Some hopes?
Perhaps. But the alternative is no hope at all. Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst
Your part in this will be to prepare for a war every one prays will never happen. Depending on the job you choose, you will rehearse battle tactics in Germany. Confront heat in Cyprus, Belize or Hong Kong. And a heat of a different sort in Northern Ireland.
You will practice, repair, train and try to forge links with your men that will withstand fire. Occasionally, you may be asked to clamber into a VC10 on the way to, well, somewhere like monitoring a ceasefire in Rhodesia.
But more often, the worst enemy your men will face will be boredom, when it will take all your skills as a teacher and manager to motivate them.
Then it will be difficult to remember that you are still protecting your country and all you love most. An easy question to dodge
The question is, are you prepared to take the job on for three years or longer?
No one will accuse you if you don't.
Women won't send you white feathers and children won't ask what you did in the war.
All we ask is that every young man at least takes the question seriously and answers it to the
satisfaction of his own conscience.
This way we are bound to get our 900 new Officers.
If you are undecided but want to take the matter a stage further without committing yourself in any way, write to Major John Floyd, Army officer Entry, Department A12, Lansdowne House, Berkeley Square, London W1X6AA.
Tell him your date of birth, your educational qualifications and why you want to join us.
He will send you booklets to give you a far larger picture of the life and, if you like, put you in touch
with people who can tell you more about the career.
Army Officer References
Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered
At Harvard University In 1955,1962. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals In Language Usage.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co.
Grice, Herbert Paul 1975. "Logic and conversation." In Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts,
edited by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Gumperz, John Joseph, and Anwar S. Dil. 1971. Language in Social Groups: Essays. Language
Science and National Development Series. Stanford, Cal: Stanford University Press. Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of pragmatics. Longman linguistics library, title no. 30. London; New York: Longman.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge
[Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press. Mills, Sara. 2003. Gender and politeness. Studies in interactional sociolinguistics 17. Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press. Penman, Robyn. 1990. "Facework & Politeness: Multiple Goals In Courtroom Discourse." Journal of Language and Social Psychology 9 (1-2): 15-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927x9091002. Schiffrin, Deborah Sue. 1994. Approaches to Discourse. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Scollon, Ronald, and Suzanne B. K. Scollon. 1995 Intercultural communication: a discourse
approach. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Searle, John Rogers. 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Spolsky, Bernard. 1998. Sociolinguistics. Oxford introductions to language study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trees, April R., and Valerie Manusov. 1998. "Managing Face Concerns in Criticism Integrating Nonverbal Behaviors as a Dimension of Politeness in Female Friendship Dyads." Human Communication Research 24 (4): 564-583. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1998.tb00431.x.
Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding pragmatics. Understanding language series. London; New York, New York: Arnold; Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Steven R., Min-Sun Kim, and Hendrika Meischke. 1991. "Evaluating Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory: A Revised Analysis of Directives and Face." Research on Language & Social Interaction 25 (1-4): 215-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351819109389363.
Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. Author information
Biook Behnam is an Associate Professor at Azarbaijan University of Tarbiat Moallem, Tabriz, Iran. Davud Kuhi is a PhD Student, Islamic Azad University, Maragheh, Iran.
Copyrights
Copyright for this article is retained by the author, with publication rights granted to the journal.
