The Discourse of Classified Advertising: Exploring the Nature of Linguistic Simplicity (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics)

225 Pages·1996·9.4 MB·English

by  Paul Bruthiaux

The Discourse
of Classified Advertising
OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Edward Finegan, General Editor
Editorial Advisory Board
Douglas Biber
Alessandro Duranti
John R. Rickford
Suzanne Romaine
Deborah Tannen
Locating Dialect in Discourse
The Language of Honest Men and Bonnie Lassies in Ayr
RONALD K.S. MACAULAY
English in Its Social Contexts
Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics
EDITED BY TIM W. MACHAN AND CHARLES T. SCOTT
Coherence in Psychotic Discourse
BRANCA TELLES RIBEIRO
Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register
EDITED BY DOUGLAS BIBER AND EDWARD FINEGAN
Gender and Conversational Interaction
EDITED BY DEBORAH TANNEN
Therapeutic Ways with Words
KATHLEEN WARDEN FERRARA
The Linguistic Individual
Self-Expression in Language and Linguistics
BARBARA JOHNSTONE
The Discourse of Classified Advertising
Exploring the Nature of Linguistic Simplicity
PAUL BRUTHIAUX
The Discourse
of Classified Advertising
Exploring the Nature
of Linguistic Simplicity
PAUL BRUTHIAUX
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1996
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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and associated companies in
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Copyright © 1996 by Paul Bruthiaux
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bruthiaux, Paul.
The discourse of classified advertising : exploring the nature of
linguistic simplicity / Paul Bruthiaux.
p. cm.—(Oxford studies in socioHnguistics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510032-8
1. Advertising—Language. 2. Advertising, Classified. 3. English
language—Usage. I. Title. II. Series.
HF5827.B75 1996
659.13'2—dc20 95-41493
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
SERIES FOREWORD
Simply put, sociolinguistics is the study of language in use. With
special focus on the relationships between language and society,
sociolinguistics addresses the forms and functions of variation
across social groups and across the range of communicative situa-
tions in which speakers and writers deploy their verbal repertoires.
In short, sociolinguistics examines discourse as it is constructed and
co-constructed, shaped and reshaped, in the interactions of every-
day life and as it creates and reflects the social realities of that life.
Some linguists examine the structure of sentences independent of
who is speaking or writing and to whom, independent of what pre-
cedes and what follows in the discourse, and independent of setting,
topic, and purpose, but sociolinguists and discourse analysts inves-
tigate linguistic expression in its social and situational contexts.
Among observers who are not professional linguists, interest like-
wise focuses on language in discourse, for it is there that the pat-
terns of social structure and strategic enterprise that engage the
attention of so many people are mirrored.
Offering a platform for studies of language use in communities
around the globe, Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics invites
synchronic or diachronic treatments of social dialects and registers,
of oral, written, or signed discourse. The series welcomes studies that
are descriptive or theoretical, interpretive or analytical. While its
volumes usually report original research, an occasional one synthe-
sizes or interprets existing knowledge. The series aims for a style that
is accessible beyond linguists to other humanists and social scien-
tists, and some volumes may appeal to educated readers keenly in-
terested in the language of human affairs—for example, the discourse
of doctors or lawyers engaging clients and one another with specialist
registers or, as in the volume at hand, of women and men selling
cars, renting apartments, and seeking friendship and love through
vi Series Foreword
classified advertisements. By providing a forum for innovative studies
of language in use, Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics aims to influ-
ence the agenda for linguistic research in the 21st century and pro-
vide an array of provocative analyses to help launch that agenda.
In The Discourse of Classified Advertising, Paul Bruthiaux pro-
vides a detailed analysis of linguistic forms and communicative func-
tions in four types of ads: automobile sales, apartment rentals, job
vacancies, and personals. Focusing on gauges of simplicity, he point-
edly refers to certain characteristic features as "simple" rather than
"simplified." Besides similarities among diverse "simple" registers,
he notes differences in the kinds of simplicity characteristic of ad
types and links them to communicative functions. Giving emphasis
to conventionalized features in ads, Bruthiaux argues for a view of
discourse in which prefabricated chunks play a more significant role
than is typically assumed in current grammatical theories. Along with
a detailed analysis of 800 classified ads, Bruthiaux offers arguments
for modified views of simplicity and of the role of convention in
discourse. We are pleased to have this combined empirical and theo-
retical analysis of The Discourse of Classified Advertising as the latest
contribution to Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics.
Edward Finegan
PREFACE
In any urban area, the classified ad columns of the local press reveal
a great deal about day-to-day realities. What is it like to live and
work here? What does it cost to rent a house? What is the going price
for a 1987 Honda Civic? What kind of jobs are available, if any?
How do parents find a math tutor for a recalcitrant schoolchild? Do
lonely hearts search for partners independently, or are deals still
struck between families? For the visitor, the wealth of spontaneous
information available in the classified ads has no match even in the
best researched travel book, to say nothing of that ultimate adver-
tising concept, the in-flight magazine.
Yet, to the casual observer and the student of advertising alike,
the classified ad columns are unobtrusive, unfancied, and mostly
taken for granted. Textbooks on the language of advertising typi-
cally cover the subject in a few lines, if they mention it at all. Future
professional advertisers hone their skills on display advertising and
of course on television commercials. Though a few telephone sales
executives may earn a commission from encouraging customers to
stretch out their texts, few look forward to a challenging career in
classified advertising.
The classified ads play a major part in keeping the commercial press
alive, since few modern newspapers cover their costs from their cover
price alone. Classified ads provide newspapers with a varied and de-
pendable income. Although costs to individual advertisers are low,
the aggregate benefit to the newspaper can be vast—so much so that
newspapers threatened with a new entrant in the marketplace will not
hesitate to protect what is often a local monopoly on classified adver-
tising through expensive advertising campaigns, using TV glamorous
commercials to glamorize unglamorous ads if necessary.
So far, the economic benefit of classified advertising to contem-
porary journalism and its potential for casting light on the social
viii Preface
realities of life in a modern city have not been matched by much
interest on the part of linguists in general and of discourse analysts
in particular. This is curious, if only because access to primary sources
is easy, often free, and only limited by the analyst's ability to handle
the wealth of material available. For the benefit of analysts of clas-
sified advertising, linguistic data grow abundantly in recycling bins,
second only in convenience to the intuitional variety, though more
reliable as a representation of the human potential for making lan-
guage mean.
But much more important is that these data have the potential to
reveal a great deal about the nature of language, its structure and
its use. Earlier research has shown that humans appear to be endowed
with the ability to limit the complexities of the language they use to
the perceived ability of their interlocutors. Moreover, whenever lan-
guage is kept simple, to make communication possible with an in-
fant or a foreign visitor, for example, humans appear to rely quite
spontaneously on a common core of linguistic strategies which keep
linguistic form manageable for all concerned. While this has been
widely documented for varieties such as Baby Talk or pidgins, one
of the aims of this book is to discover whether similar strategies are
also invoked when the texts of classified ads are produced under
different constraints such as severe limitations on the space avail-
able. Thus the study of classified advertising has the potential to
reveal both similarities and differences across a range of simple vari-
eties as well as in the relationship between features of linguistic sim-
plicity and communicative function. This inquiry meant that three
major steps had to be taken.
The first is to arrive at a thorough description of the discourse of
classified advertising, and a substantial part of this book is devoted
to an exploration of what makes this variety distinctive. Just as the
language of headlines or of academic note-taking, for example, ex-
hibits a particular set of idiosyncracies, classified ads immediately
strike the reader as written in a way which would not be suitable
for any other purpose in any other context. Ultimately, the catalogu-
ing of the particular idiosyncracies of the language of classified ad-
vertising must be as comprehensive as that of more familiar vari-
eties such as pidgins or standard written English. As many of these
Preface ix
idiosyncracies are to be found at the micro-level, that is, in the way
in which language is structured over relatively short segments, the
descriptive part of this book provides a thorough account of what
might be called the syntax of classified ads.
But because few situations of use are ever altogether novel, lan-
guage in use is unlikely to consist of entirely original combinations
and patterns. Since this is as true of the discourse of classified ad-
vertising as of any other language variety, a second area of investi-
gation concerns the presence in classified ads of items borrowed from
previous discourse and inserted whole into a text. These items can
be as short as a three-letter acronym or as long as an entire ad. In
addition, recycling and conventionalization can affect the way in
which the major semantic components of an ad are sequenced. That
is, what is considered important must somehow be highlighted in
the text and the appropriate lexico-grammatical strategies must be
selected to make these semantic highlights clear to readers. Against
a background of formulaic repetition, conventionalized patterns,
once set up, can be exploited and departed from to varying degrees
of creativity over relatively long stretches of discourse. Whereas
previous studies have shown this process at work in the discourse of
display advertising and television commercials, it remains to be docu-
mented in classified advertising.
Finally, a major aim of the book is to test the assumption that the
idiosyncratic form of classified ads is primarily the result of the com-
pression caused by tight spatial constraints. Since few phenomenon
can ever be ascribed to a single cause, it is important to investigate
whether the linguistic form of classified ads may have wider functional
correlates. Here, this involves quantiyfing the presence in these texts
of a range of syntactic components, and comparing their distribution
across different ad types. If this distribution turns out to be roughly
constant despite major differences in content and in communicative
purpose between these ad types, then spatial constraints must be as-
sumed to be the dominant factor shaping classified ads. If on the other
hand the syntactic characteristics of these texts are found to vary sys-
tematically across ad types, then the correlates of that variation will
need to be uncovered and a functional explanation offered. In this
sense, this book is also a study of register variation.