Relevance Theory And Contextual Implications In Advertising Language

Relevance Theory, a pragmatic theory developed from Grice's ideas by Sperber and Wilson, argues that a hearer will make the effort to process a communication if he or she feels it will alter or enrich his or her cognitive environment. It can be useful for increasing the effectiveness of advertising communication. This is because the people's attitude toward advertising today is bored tolerance and they will make only a few moments' effort to interpret the text of an advertisement. In these few moments, if they feel that the information of a certain advertisement will not make much contribution to their cognitive environment, or say, not relevant enough to them or, even though they are willing to make such effort but fail to come to any fruitful result, the advertisement will be a failure as a communication. In this sense, advertising must be relevant enough to enough people, otherwise the product dies. On the other hand, the information of advertising is not supposed to be too readily accessible to the audience in that this will make the audience bored and thus loose their interest in it and make the advertisement invalid. To avoid this, advertisers tend to use various implication devices to add interest and taste to advertisements. Relevance Theory is also helpful for analyzing and improving the effectiveness of such creative devices. While essentially a theory of pragmatics, relevance theory gives a complete account of the recovery of meaning of an utterance. 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, repetition, length of text, media-specific contextual implications, and cancellation of implicature.