Relevance Theory and the Language of Advertising. CLS Occasional Paper No. 31.

Relevance theory, the premise that a hearer will make the effort to process a communication if he or she feels it will alter or enrich his/her cognitive environment, can be useful for increasing the effectiveness of advertising communication. It is particularly helpful for analyzing and improving the effectiveness of the creative devices often used in advertising language to add interest and additional meaning to the text. While essentially a theory of pragmatics, relevance theory gives a complete account of the recovery of meaning of an utterance. Advertising text commonly contains variations on accepted standards of grammaticality and specific contextual implications. Analysis of the text using relevance theory can expose the text/context interaction and illustrate the role of linguistic style as a tool for conveying more than is actually verbalized. Areas that can be targeted by such analysis include disambiguation and referential assignment, readers' anticipatory hypotheses, examination of phonetic effects, repetition, text length, media-specific contextual implications, intertext devices, illocutionary force, and cancellation of implicature. A 97-item bibliography is included. (MSE)