The construction of meaning in advertising: a relevance theoretic approach

This thesis examines advertising from the perspective of pragmatics, especially concentrating on what components of the overall message are conveyed via (a) literal text and imagery (b) explicatures (c) implicatures. It explores brands marketing conventional meat and dairy-based products in relation to brands marketing equivalent unconventional plant-based products, the objective being to determine whether these two product categories differ in their use of certain pragmatic features. Consequently, the study also considers how attributes and benefits prevail in contemporary advertising, and it outlines how the medium ultimately works as a form of social communication. The message will be explored by means of pragmatic text analysis; a method drawn from Relevance Theory in which cognitive-pragmatic processes presented by Wilson and Sperber (2012) are at the centre of attention. Concurrently, notions vital to professional advertising practice will play an equally large role, where Simpson’s (2001) direct-oblique continuum and Shimp’s (2007) attributes and benefits are employed, the aim being to take steps towards developing a theoretical model which can account for advertising language and its context. The study shows that the overall message in contemporary advertising is conveyed through explicatures to a much larger extent than previously thought, and studies into the pragmatics of advertising are, thus, said to have underestimated the explicature to date. It is also suggested that interaction takes place between advert and audience regardless of what product is marketed, and regardless of how likely the audience are to trust the advertiser or believe in the ideas he presents. Instead, advertising language is first and foremost a construction dependent on a number of pragmatic processes, in which determination of context and the inferences constructed by the audience are of vital importance. A novel aspect of the approach in this study is that much more emphasis is given to explicatures compared to previous research. Furthermore, in contrast to most studies into advertising that consider it to be a strongly persuasive and forceful device, this study establishes a viewpoint in which advertising discourse is considered as a form of social communication whose only commitment is to construct and transfer meaning in order to interact with its audience.