The language of non-commercial advertising: A pragmatic approach

The current study explores the language of non-commercial advertising, both quantitatively and qualitatively, within the framework of pragmatics. The main incentive is (1) to investigate how creators of such advertising aim to seek attention, inform and persuade, and (2) to examine whether non-commercial and commercial advertising differ linguistically. Orbiting around key notions of Relevance Theory and Tanaka’s pragmatic approach to advertising, the study pays attention to how collected advertisements use internal and external contexts in their explicit and implicit language, and whether their language complies with the hierarchy present in commercial advertising in which information is subordinated to persuasion. The findings show that language functions in non-commercial advertising are frequently incorporated into complex arrangements in which they sometimes overlap and/or collaborate. Such arrangements appear to cause the audience to be inventive and to use extra processing efforts in solving explicit and implicit problems of the stimulus. Moreover, it is suggested that non-commercial and commercial advertising do not differ from one another in a linguistic sense. There are, indeed, times when non-commercial advertisers leave out clear persuasion and instead aim their main focus at improving the audience’s knowledge. In a purely linguistic sense, however, it is shown that persuasive language is always embedded, which indicates that the genre is not necessarily less persuasive than its commercial counterpart.