Abstract
ABSTRACTIn June 2015, Spar published a series of advertisements for its liquor store, TOPS at Spar. One of the advertisements used the slogan ‘Grab a drink and show off those PJ Powers’. The singer, PJ Powers, was informed of this advertisement and Powers accused Spar not only of using her name without her permission but also of poking fun at her past struggle with alcohol addiction. Taking into account the main assumptions of relevance theory and the possible general knowledge of the average South African as well as the co-text and context of the advertisement, I will illustrate that consumers in South Africa are highly likely to associate the lexical co-occurrence ‘PJ Powers’ with the singer and not with a ‘pyjama party theme’ suggested by Spar in its apology. A small corpus based on newspaper texts, two different corpus analysis tools, Antconc and Leximancer, and a Google search are used to support my arguments.
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