In a nutshell.pdf

Chapter 5 In a nutshell Persuasion in the spatially constrained language of advertising Paul Bruthiaux The urge to persuade fellow humans is powerful the opportunities are many and the contexts varied A consequence of this variation is that persuasive language takes many forms The language of advertising for example is con strained by a range of contextual factors one of the most immediately dis tinctive of which is the severe spatial constraints within which writers must operate Even in display advertising the larger type seen on billboards or in magazines and usually including graphics and photos texts typically cover only a small proportion of the available space while in classifi ed advertising therequirementto compresscontentwithin tight limitsisevenmoredramatic So much so that this sense of spatial restriction appears to have become the primary defi ning characteristic of the language of advertising Yet this sense of spatial restriction also goes against the very nature of persuasion It is surely inconceivable regrettably perhaps thatsimilarrestrictionsshouldeverbeim posed on prototypically persuasive genres such as sermons electoral speeches or legal arguments Similarly the very essence of persuasive language would seem to depend on writers operating free of spatial or in the case of sermons and speeches temporal limitations the better to display their skill the better to persuade Yet professional advertisers prosper while millions of anonymous buyers and sellers transact business through classifi ed ads So persuasive their texts must be and enough readers must in the end be persuaded or outlets for these texts would have disappeared long ago 1 Instead they fl ourish on the Internet and elsewhere as never before For the linguist this presents a double challenge 1 to describe precisely the linguistic nature of the language of ad vertising and 2 to explain how the interaction between the urge to persuade Paul Bruthiaux and the contextual factors that constrain all communication play out in this genre and give it its defi ning characteristics In response this paper presents a description of the syntax of advertising language in texts of both the classifi ed and display types It shows that the de gree of syntactic elaboration varies substantially even when content of equal simplicity complexity or familiarity to readers is being presented and that this variation appears to correlate with perceptions of status on the parts of both writersandreaders Thepaperproposesthattheneedforwriterstomanipulate readers self image overrides the competing need to present content explic itly That is a display of sophisticated language may by itself be a key factor in determining which text will generate more interest among naturally status conscious readers and which writers of advertising material will thus have the edge over less skillful competitors The paper also suggests that the language of advertising refl ects the development and role of social intelligence namely the need to correctly assess the desires and motives of other group members and to display our own advantageously Thus the manipulation of complex linguistic structures may be linked with the manipulation of complex social relationships and hence with status An initial working assumption is that the spatial constraints imposed on all advertising writing of both the display and classifi ed types will cre ate special diffi culties for the writers A second working assumption is that these constraints will be no match for the human urge to persuade and trans act The bet is that linguistic ingenuity will come to the rescue and that the communicative urge and its persuasive component will prevail as appro priate context specifi c linguistic adaptations emerge at both the syntactic and discoursal levels For several decades now the literature of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis has recorded and explicated the mechanisms by which language form adjusts to the contexts in which it is used 2Yet even today innovative ex amples keep surfacing sometimes from the most unexpected quarters From the world of journalism for example comes the hitherto unacknowledged and in any case now defunct genre of cablese Dionne 1999 a mostly non persuasive mode of communication between newspaper editors and foreign correspondents This genrewas honed in the titanic struggle between strict in structions from Head Offi ce to keep cabling costs low and the relentless drive on the part of telegraph company offi cials to maximize revenueby counting as many words as possible Inevitably this pressure to condense led to immediate morphological creativity as in the following examples In a nutshell 1 Eye Exjoburging Nairobiward I am leaving Johannesburg and traveling to Nairobi 2 Queen Daughtered The Queen has given birth to a daughter Naturally rule bending on this scale will only be effective if the interaction is limited to a small number of expert writers and readers who know each other well if the specifi c contextual pressures are understood by both sides and if the number of permissible departures from the norm for example the na ture and scope of affi xing rules is small in number and mutually agreed if only tacitly 3Yet even within these boundaries there is room for humor born of deliberate miscommunication through misparsing as illustrated by the re sponse to an editor s question regarding President Banda of Nyassaland now Malawi whose advanced age remained a state secret until his death 3 How Old Banda Old Banda Fine How You How old is Banda How is Old Banda Old Banda is fi ne how are you In contrast the language of advertising is the product of a linguistic adapta tion to a context in which messages are aimed at a vast audience representing an array of backgrounds and presuppositions that can only be guessed at by the writers Writers of advertising language have no personal connection with the consumers of their linguistic production and there is no scope for the immediate feedback that might allow writers to correct any interactional mis calculations One direct result of this communicative situation is that writers must perform a persuasive double act in something of a communicative fog They must fi rst persuade unidentifi able readers to notice their text among a proliferation of competing offers Then they must convince readers of the su periority of their wares overthose of their competitors For writers this creates a tension between the temptation to do whatever it takes to be noticed and the need to remain suffi ciently conventional and to the point to be understood once noticed all within strict spatial limitations 4 As with all language variation linguistic adaptations to this challenge vary according to a cluster of factors not least among them content This is es pecially apparent in the spatially constrained language of classifi ed ads In Bruthiaux 1996 I showed that far from being uniform across ad types the language of classifi ed advertising systematically covaries in syntactic elabo ration with the nature of the proposed transaction here second hand cars apartments for rent jobs offered and romantic relationships sought As mea sured by the ratio of function words articles auxiliaries copulas modals and Paul Bruthiaux prepositions to content words nouns adjectives verbs and adverbs lin guistic form varies from an almost complete absence of grammatical structure beyondmerejuxtapositionofcontentwordstoasubstantialdegreeofsyntactic elaboration surprisingly so given the pressures for spatial economy At one extreme texts advertising used cars for sale do little more than list the salient features of the item being offered 4 82ChevyCamaroZ28 59m 4speed goodtires newpaint stereo loaded excellent condition 4 200 Call Further along the content function word continuum ads offering apartments for rent show limited coordination and a higher frequency of prepositional phrases 5 Los Angeles large 1 bedroom apartment employed and references re quired near Western and King no Section 8 475 per month Call Classifi ed ads for jobs offered go further still with frequent use of fully elabo rated noun and verb phrases and greater reliance on coordination 6 Personal Assistant wanted for phones and reception room cleaning must be able to follow procedures 6 per hour tips and bonuses after training day or evenings Call At the far end of the continuum personal ads come closest to full syntactic elaboration in that despite the genre markingabbreviations that have become their trademark such as ISO in search of SWF single white female or NS ND no smoking no drugs they tend to consist of creative word choices and phrasings combining into often complex sentences 7 I m not dead yet my love life is DWF 35 Monty Pythonite seeks emotion ally mature thirty something WM interested in torrid stability Call Clearly syntactic elaboration ortheweavingoflexicalitemsintorecognizable phrasesandsentences cannottakeplace withouttheintroductionoffunction words intothe linguisticedifi ce Wheneverspace is notan issue this has theef fect of increasing the total amount of language being produced while lowering the lexical density of the whole Under tight spatial constraints however the function words introduced into the mix as part of the sentence building pro cess unavoidably take up some of the space that could have been devoted to semantically richer presumably more valuable content words Since all writers of classifi ed ads operate under broadly uniform conditions and are presumed In a nutshell to be aiming for maximum economy of form the puzzle is the following 1 Why is it that some ad types systematically exhibit features of syntactic elabo rationnormallyfoundinspatially unconstrainedtextswhile othersavoidthem almosttotally And 2 whatcontextualforcesleadtothissystematicvariation In a sense these issues parallel those at the heart ofthe grammaticalization process The wonder is not that pidgins for example mutate into full fl edged languages by acquiring larger vocabularies and more complex syntax Clearly thecomplexitiesofsocial andinterpersonalrelationsrequirearangeoflinguis tic choices which merepidgins cannot hope to provide What is more puzzling is that language systems and language users alike so often opt for a level of complexity that seems gratuitous at fi rst To quote Klein 1998 546 Why do some manifestations of the human language capacity have com plexifi cations whereas others do not Where and why are they necessary where are they just decorum faithfully handed down from one generation to the next without any deeper reason highly esteemed by linguists but utterly detested by second language learners In spatially constrained language especially complexities appear not only gra tuitous but downrightwasteful Thus the challenge is to understandthe factors that may lead those individuals to make these seemingly irrational and pre sumably subconscious choices One way to account for this phenomenon is to argue that syntactic varia tion in these compressed texts as in all language use should be directly linked to the communicative characteristics of each situation Following Finegan and Biber 1994 the key would be to link syntactic elaboration in the language of advertising with a greater or lesser requirement for explicitness Citing ex tensive crosslinguistic evidence Finegan and Biber stress that language use is shapedinthecompetitiveinterplaybetweentheneedtomakemessagesasclear as possible for decoders versusthe temptation to cut corners and go for ease of encoding As Finegan and Biber 1994 337 write all interlocutors irrespective of social affi liation produce more explicit and elaborated expression in literate situations having little direct inter action little shared context high informational purposes and extensive op portunity for careful production Conversely all interlocutors produce more economical expression in oral situations having extensive interaction and shared context low informational purposes and little opportunity for careful production In other words how far writers will go the extra length and make things easier for readers depends on factors such as the amount and type of information Paul Bruthiaux shared among the participants whether the medium is spoken or written and variation in planning time and opportunities for editing Thus it is the ever varying need for greater or lesser explicitness which determines the degree of syntactic elaboration which writers are willing to build into their texts in the hope that readers will settle for this compromise and that reasonably smooth communication will follow In the language of classifi ed advertising the case for explicitness is strong when we examine the role played by prepositions Though conventionally de scribed as function words these items are semantically highly contentful and low in redundancy Thus they cannot be left out of compressed messages without dramatically redirecting meaning or affecting comprehensibility as in the following extract from a hypothetical classifi ed ad in which different preposition choices change the content of the message quite radically 8 Work at in from through the airport The diffi culty is that not all function words are equal in terms of content fulness Rather they range over a continuum from high contentfulness low redundancy as with prepositions to low contentfulness high redundancy for example indefi nite articles Meanwhile items such as the highly deictic personalpronounsfallsomewhereinthemiddlebecausetheirreferentscanof tenbe recoveredfromcontextual clues in this register as in others In classifi ed ads however it is not clear how the costly inclusionof low contentfulness high redundancy items such as articles or pronouns promotes greater explicitness thanin alternativeversionsin which theseitemshavebeendeliberatelyleftout as in the following examples 9 I like going to the movies and the beach Like movies beach 10 You must have a home computer Must have home computer So while a requirement for greater explicitness undoubtedly plays a part in shaping these texts some other factor must also be at play in convincing ad vertisers consciously or otherwise that it is worth their while investing some of their precious linguistic resources in relatively dispensable material In Bruthiaux 1996 I suggest that greater use of this dispensable material is found in texts predicting a long term more strongly interpersonal relation ship between writer and reader such as classifi ed ads offering employment or seeking romantic partners and less in texts predicting a brief to non existent interpersonal relationship as in ads advertising apartments for rent and especially used cars Thus I suggest that the key factor behind this varia In a nutshell tion may be the need to persuade and impress manifested linguistically in the display of relatively sophisticated language Although the language in which these messages are couched carries little readily identifi able propositional con tent it is intended to show that writers have the ability to manipulate that language skillfully and they will choose to display this ability in the hope that the more skillful language user should have the edge over less skillful competi tors For evidence I now turn to another type of advertising language that of promotional catalogs Advertising catalogs come in many forms but they all share a number of basic characteristics Like classifi ed ads their aim is to persuade readers to notice and then select specifi c products over the claims of equally deter mined competitors They differ from classifi ed ads however in that they are notproducedbycost conscious individualsbuttypically byorganizationswith substantial advertising budgets and with no direct competition for space from other advertisers within their own catalog But as in classifi ed ads descriptions of products and exhortations to transact are subject to spatial compression with large amounts of available space left unfi lled by either photos or text Given this broadly uniform and apparently self imposed degree of tex tualcompression itcanbehypothesized that 1 inadvertisingtextsdescribing itemsincommonusagesuchasgroceries standardfurnitureoreverydaycloth ing the need for explicitness will be broadly equal across different catalogs Since readers hardly need to be reminded of the primary function of sardines sofas or socks it can be reasonably assumed that 2 any language not pri marily fulfi lling an essential descriptive informational purpose will be left out including low contentfulness high redundancy items such as articles as discussed above To test this hypothesis a corpus was assembled from a range of advertis ing catalogs distributed in the Southern California area with some available more widely on the Internet and representing a wide variety of products These sources werethendivided intotwo groupsaccording to the glamorous or utilitarian orientation of the source At one end of the continuum were placed sources that trade on the sensuality of their products Victoria s Secret cultivate a relatively upmarket image Macy s Levitz or are known locally for their dedication to providing quality products for the discerning yet cost conscious palate Trader Joe s All tend to offer products that appeal to the status conscious At the other end of the continuum were placed a variety of sources that trade on their practical image by providing bare necessities while emphasizing immediate need convenience and affordability Table 1 Paul Bruthiaux Table 1 Catalog sources glamorousN 5 682 wordsutilitarianN 3 192 words Levitz furnitureGerald s paint and hardware Macy s department storesHome Depot home improvement Trader Joe s groceriesPic n Save variety stores Victoria s Secret women s apparelRalph s supermarkets Riteaid pharmacies Sav On Drugs pharmacies Von s supermarkets At the glamorous end it is immediately clear that given the comparable