Review of Lars Hermeren (1999), English for Sale: A study of the language
of advertising. Lund (Sweden): Lund University Press.
By Tom Cobb, UQAM
For RQL (Révue Québecoise de Linguistique)
At a time when it is no longer clear that applied
linguistics is simply linguistics applied (Widdowson, 2000),
Lars Hermeren's English for Sale is very much a case of good-old
linguistics applied. The concepts and principles of linguistics, along with its
allies rhetoric, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, are called up to help
us make sense of the verbal component of that most ubiquitous of modern linguistic
genres, advertising. For many people, advertising copy is most of what they will
read over the course of a year, a trend that will only increase as new media
find new nooks and crannies to insert themselves into--or, new doors to get
their feet into. We clearly need to understand more about how advertising works
if we are to protect ourselves from its wiles and yet make use of the
information it offers and moreover enjoy the creativity and playfulness of a
genre that clearly attracts some of our most inventive wordsmiths.
The "we" who need this information is of
course everybody, and that is who Hermeren's book is written for. An educated
reader with no background in language study can easily make sense of the study,
and yet that is not because the analysis is watered down. Nor need the reader
have any particular axe to grind with advertising to enjoy the book. The
author's tone throughout is critical but non-judgmental. He writes, for
instance, that "advertisers normally make the strongest claim possible
(they would be stupid if they did not!)" (p. 156). The social critic and
the ad man will both find much to enjoy in this treatment, and indeed Hermeren
has enjoyed the cooperation of several big agencies who have contributed more than
50 copyrighted reproductions.
The analytic tools of language study that the author
brings to bear on advertising include these:
·
genre analysis (Is advertising a genre in Swales,
1990, sense?);
·
the speech vs. writing distinction (Advertising is
written language but with skilled use of
punctuation simulates the intimacy of conversation);
·
Gricean maxims (Advertising achieves its effects by
systematically derailing our normal expectations about language);
·
communications theory (Advertising is a one-to-many
mode of communication, but advertisers find ways to simulate one-to-one
interactivity);
·
semantic theory (Proper names have "reference but
no sense," but advertisers effectively create a middle ground for their
brand names);
·
historical linguistics (Since English has lost most of
its inflections, it is a treasure chest of puns for advertisers to help
themselves to--"on lead, we lead");
·
rhetorical structure (People respond in predictable
ways to certain discourse schemas, such as problem and solution--"your
hair, our shampoo");
·
chunking theory (The psychologically real unit of
language is the phrase, not the word or the sentence)…
You read this book, you go out into the world, and you
see evidence of its insights on every pillar and post. You may not be convinced
by all its arguments (the book relies more on quasi-literary interpretation
than on empirical procedures to make its claims), but most readers will have a
framework they did not have before for thinking about this most pervasive of
discourse modes.
As an educator and student
of language acquisition, I was particularly interested to see that advertisers
rely on cognitive psychology and related learning theory for effective delivery
of their messages. If I had previously assumed anything about psychology and
advertising, it was that advertisers worked within a crude version of behaviourism
in an effort to build links in male minds between expensive cars and attractive
young women. But it turns out that, like everyone else, the advertisers have
undergone the cognitive revolution and are no longer limited to such simple
tricks. Advertisers deploy research showing that new information "is not
just written into memory pure and simple but is substantially altered to fit
pre-existing structures of knowledge" (p. 35); that people's beliefs
strongly influence their perceptions (p. 37); that people are more likely to
remember a message if they have had to perform some physical activity in
relation to it (p. 44), or some mental activity, such as double-taking a pun
("If you want your business to pick up, pick up the phone", p.
136); that people remember implicit
claims as having been explicit ("Get through the winter without a cold -
take Eradicold ", p. 163, is remembered as "If you take Eradicold,
then…"); that people are likely to assume that neologisms ("the drink
that's being schnapped up by the millions," p. 137) betoken new concepts
and hence new realities.
However, Hermeren
often accepts too uncritically the relevance of experimental research that has
never been tested in the domain of advertising. He relies on studies that were
undertaken in the context of normal or educational messages to speculate about
how advertising works, assuming that the findings must automatically apply to
advertising messages in the same way. But people know when they are being
advertised to and resist avertising messages to varying degrees, so that
advertising communications cannot be assumed to follow the rules of normal
communication. For example, the author speculates on the role of a riddle or
quiz-question format to involve the reader:
The
language of avertising provides us from time to time with questions in the form
of riddles. Here is one:
What does
an eclipse have in common with coffee beans?
This
sounds like a game or a competition in which someone tests your knowledge by
asking you questions for the purposes of entertainment, perhaps before an
audience. In other words, the question looks very much like a quiz question. But
it is not. It is the headline of an advertisement promoting a brand of
Colombian coffee. That no answer is provided to the question in the headline is
no accident. An intriguing question tempts the mystified reader to examine the
advertisement for an answer. The fact that there is no answer results in the
question sticking in the mind of the reader, as unresolved problems tend to do.
What is more, the unexpected parallel between a natural phenomenon and the
product might prompt the reader's imagination towards finding a personal answer
to the quiz-like question in the headline, which in turn would lead to the
reader being more actively engaged in the advertisement. (p. 63)
The author supports
this reasoning with some findings from educational research (p. 67) showing
that school children remember material better if they have answered questions
about it. However, we do not see any specifically advertising research to
support the claim. The consumer of coffee is not a school child, and is not
trying to please a teacher, displease a teacher, gain the support of peers, or
achieve any of the myriad other objectives of school children, so we cannot
take it as given that the educational research will automatically apply here.
Advertisers are free to assume that any language research will apply to
advertising, but, then, they face their bottom line in a different way from the
writer of a scholarly text. For me, the Colombian coffee citation positively
bristles with assertions demanding empirical verification, not vague resemblances
to some educational findings. Is an ad with a question in fact better
remembered? Does a personal answer in fact engage the reader more actively?
As already mentioned,
the book is a fine exercise in applying linguistics and in raising consciousness
about how advertising language works, and nothing can take away from that.
There is further work to be done on some of the explanations. But this is only
to say that Hermeren's book is a catalogue of fascinating and principled but
mainly unproven ideas about the language of advertising--a trove of
dissertation ideas for generations of research students to come who want to
forge links between life and linguistics.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre
analysis. London: Cambridge University Press.
Widdowson, H. (2000).
On the limitations of linguistics applied. Applied Linguistics 21 (1),
3-25.