A Study Of The Speech Act Metonymies In Public Service Advertising Slogans

According to Austin (1975), a philosopher of language, language doesnot simply state or describe, but also acts. Searle (1975) classified speechacts into five broad categories of speech acts: representatives, directives,commissives, expressives and declarations. After Searle,the cognitivelinguist Hernandez (2004) described various speech acts as locatedsomewhere on a cline from “Commissive” to “Directive”. Advertisingslogans may be treated as a variety of “speech act” considering itsspeech-like tenor, and public service advertising slogans viewed from apragmatic perspective fall within the category of “directive” speech actsdue to its persuasive ends despite the informative forms(Crystal andDavy,1983). Public service advertising differs from the everydaycommercial advertising in that it does not pose a pure fair-and-justmoney-commodity relationship as the latter normally does. Citing WangDuoming’s(1996) definition, public service advertisements arenon-profit-oriented, appealing to the public for their attention tocritical social issues and proper constraint of behavior in line withpublic interest by delivering a certain concept in favor of a certainsocial trend or undertaking. Moreover, varying advertiser-audiencerelations are to be established depending on the distinctive themes servedand the varying illocutionary forces carried by specific slogans, say,promoting environmental protection versus asking for donation. The paper investigates the directive structures employed, and themetonymic motivation underlying the deliberate and selectiveinformation presentation in the seemingly messy and ubiquitous publicservice advertising slogans within the framework of speech actmetonymy. The theoretical framework is basically a cognitive one, yetrelevant theories are also drawn from the advertising and communicationstudies for more comprehensive analyses.170print public serviceadvertising slogans are randomly collected and categorized into4typesalong the “commissive-directive” cline by Hernandez (2004), that is,public service advertising on calling for offerings, on animal andenvironmental protection, on public health and safety, and on offeringhelp. The paper proposes different scenario structures for the four typesof slogans, conducts the metonymic analyses of the directive structures inpublic service advertising in general and also in the four types of slogansrespectively, and summarizes the pragmatic functions of speech actmetonymies in this register. The metonymic study of the directivestructures in public service advertising slogans is hopeful to enrich thelinguistic studies of public service advertising as well as adding to thediscussion of speech act metonymy in cognitive linguistics.