The Language of Advertising: Written Texts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The language of advertising: Written textsby Angela Goddard Jan Holeš The language of advertising: Written texts. 2nd edn.By Angela Goddard. London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 131. ISBN 0415278031. $16.95. This volume is a part of the ‘Intertext’ series, designed to meet the needs of contemporary English language studies. The core book, Working with texts, provides an introduction to language analysis and is accompanied by several satellite texts. Each volume may be used in conjunction with the core text or individually. The book content is highly topical, considering the development and impact of advertising on our day-to-day life. As such, it surely deserves an analysis of its form in terms of textual analysis. The book is divided into nine units, each providing an insight into one of the aspects of advertising. Unit 1 aims to examine the extent to which advertising is a kind of daily discourse and to draw some conclusions about the act of communication we call advertising. Unit 2 explores some of the strategies used by advertisers in their attempts to capture the attention of their target groups, focusing especially on the usage of images, various fonts, and text layout. Unit 3 focuses on the audience of written advertisements (called readers, receivers, consumers, addressees, or narratees). In order to explain how advertising texts work, the analytical frameworks are taken from literature and linguistics. Unit 4 looks more specifically at the language used by advertisers in written advertisements in order to achieve their effects. Emphasis is laid on the features of spoken language as well as on its functions. Unit 5 covers a range of different ways in which advertisements use intertextuality, that is, reference to another text, which may become an important component of their meaning. Unit 6 examines the cultural variation of advertisements, both of different cultures and of different eras in the same culture, often resulting in the need to adapt the advertisement text to fit the culture of its target group. Unit 7 concentrates on certain language features and strategies that recur within advertising texts, such as comparisons between advertised products, vocabulary items, slogans, and so on. Unit 8 underlines the importance of images and representations in the construction of advertising messages, focusing on how images form part of the way the audience reads the text. Special attention is paid to symbolic representation, defined as culturally agreed-upon convention, which may become a powerful source of meaning in advertising texts. The final unit considers a couple of additional questions important for the advertisement’s meaning, such as its placement and interactivity. Here emphasis is put on features of internet advertisements in comparison to their paper counterparts. All of the examples in the book are taken from the British environment. The topic is not covered exhaustively—as the title suggests. Only written advertisements are illustrated and many other types of advertisements are neglected. Despite this, the quantity of interesting examples, the graphic design, proposed activities, glossary, suggested reading, summaries, and commentaries on activities make this volume a very good textbook for students wishing to know more about this particular kind of discourse. [End Page 888] Jan Holeš Palacký University, Czech Republic Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America