Abstract: Referring to the media situation in Italy and France this article gives an overview of the most important findings of linguistic research into advertising. Starting initially from traditional print ads as multimodal texts it is shown how advertising language goes from being a general, but simple repertoire of rhetorically charged words and phrases to turning out to be a particular mode which, in deliberate intersection with the visual code, opens new ways for arousing semantic and pragmatic properties that immediately capture the potential consumers’ attention and interest. Accordingly, common and different characteristics of advertising in the AV media – in terms of their growing influence, namely in radio, cinema and television – are set out. The various issues are further looked up in the partly emerging linguistic literature and its relevance with regard to the Italian and French areas, their specific sociohistorical development and current media culture. The article thus gives insight into both, the main characteristics of advertising language as a mediating system of “hidden persuasion”, and the technological evolution of 20th century media society and its effects on language and text as promotional means in mass communication.
Keywords: advertising language, body copy, brand, broadcast media, cinema, cliffhanger, frame blending, headline, modality, multimodality, orality, paratext, radio, rhetorical means, slogan, social semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, television, trailer, visuality
With the growing presence in the mass media and their differentiated role in the globalizing postmodern consumer and event society, advertising has provided a popular subject of linguistic research. Regardless of further semiotic resources – above all, the picture – which have always constituted and characterized advertising texts as a semiotic whole, the focus of interest has been on the language of advertising. Language is currently considered as the main mediator of the “unique selling proposition”, it is responsible for the competitive value of the brand and seems to ultimately influence the persuasive impact on consumer behavior and sales success.
In its restriction to the so-called “tertiary media”, a notion which, in the history of communication, refers generally to the broadcast media – cinema, radio and television – (cf. Prakke 1968), the apparently rich research field of advertising language, mainly consisting of lists of typical language features and rhetorical devices, reveals striking deficits. In contrast to the easily accessible and thus largely documented ads in the printed media, language and textuality of advertising in radio and TV have up to the present been given marginal attention. As far as we know, there is no systematic research either concerning the fast technological development of the AV media, nor their mutual influence and change. An overview of the research situation further shows that, in recent years, the interest has quickly turned to the digital, so-called “New Media” (cf., for example, Stöckl as early as 1998; Siever/Schlobinski/Runkehl 2005), so that there is an immediate shift to be seen from the static-traditional advertising forms to the dynamic-interactive screen forms leaving mostly apart the important period in between, e. g., the era of rising, cooperating and falling of the audiovisual stations as a constantly growing mass media consumption. This observation is just as valid for linguistic research on advertising as a whole as it is for Romance languages in particular, whereby not only the respective scientific traditions, but also the different media cultures are responsible in specific ways.
The main reasons for the even more obvious neglect of the broadcast media most probably lie in the methodological difficulty of capturing fleeting data not only technically, but also in making the data scientifically accessible with the help of a neatly-acquired transcription competence. Thus, the printed advertisement remains even today the main reference for the discussion of issues in advertising language. Representing the sources of any further advertising form, print ads – according to the paradigmatic framework – raise a range of theoretical interpretations which extend from normative-evaluative, through functional-stylistic and variationalist to textpragmatic approaches (cf. the papers in Janich 2012). Although long ago propagated by Barthes and Eco in the 1960s, advertising studies are only recently opening up towards other sign systems – inspired by the iconic turn in cultural science and the movement towards Visual Grammar and thus to Social Semiotics (cf. Kress/Van Leeuwen 1996/2006 and 2001; Van Leeuwen 2005) text-semiotic approaches are developing, which perceive the advertising text as a multimodal issue. Accordingly, advertising language – inasmuch as it can further be determined at all as a definable variety – can be newly identified no longer as a single entity, but in systematic interaction with other semiotic resources (cf. Ebert 2000). If advertising language was previously rather considered as a deviation from the standard norm, or, furthermore, as the embodiment of deliberately constructed rhetoric idiosyncrasies, then it must have gained all the more by being broadcast, where it is, above all, a matter of listening and seeing; hence, on the one hand, it becomes a more and more creatively-devised link between verbal and nonverbal codes, and, on the other hand, resulting from the underestimated fact that, according to McLuhan’s (1964) conception whereby the medium is the message, it is thus decisively responsible for the function, implementation and interplay of these codes. Advertisement is therefore no longer a forum for certain language strategies and their performative tricks, but rather the catalyst of an intentionally-planned multimodal texture. This texture changes continuously with the development, modification and variation of the media situation as a whole, but retains at its core a special nature which remains authoritative in ascribing its structures and functions as well as in defining its theoretical frame.
A study of advertising language in the AV media must therefore take into account a transition phase, which is constantly shaping and reshaping its symbolism according to the rapid change from the simple print medium to the digital multimedium. Linguistically speaking, advertising language is moving in the wide spectrum between literacy and orality, profiting from the respective research areas to identify its partly overlapping characteristics. Italian linguistics has resolved this transient character by postulating a bridging concept, the so-called italiano trasmesso (Sabatini 1982 and 1997; Losi 2007) and thus introduces a media-related view of the recent alterations in the Italian language. Nevertheless, the big variety of language forms in the audiovisual media – including above all the advertising language mainly mediated in the frequent advertising spots – have found comparatively little linguistic interest. This is in complete contradiction to media reality, where the lion’s share of all advertising communication in postmodern western societies is on radio and TV which are increasingly present in every home and are thus continuously reached by a maximum of widely spread recipients in space and time.169 This contradiction becomes even clearer, inasmuch as this overview – with some short sidelong glances at France –, will primarily concentrate on Italy where an omnipresent audiovisual media empire that is financed quasi-exclusively by advertising has been established and, together with the developments in the field of personal media technology, is driving a quite specific culture of communication which is mainly characterized by populism. Hence, in order not to simply point to the research deficits in this context, (which, by the way, have been explicitly questioned in many papers dealing with advertising language; see below), the following remarks are not going to be limited to the narrow research sector of broadcasting media, but will rather draw their special character from a more extensive view.
The article comprises the following sections:
1)a short but closer survey of the most important tendencies of linguistic research into advertising
a)in their evolution from traditional language and style-related points of view via text-pragmatics to new multimodal approaches, and
b)with special regard to Romance, i.e., Italian, and – if worthy of note – French areas of study;
2)an outline of the existing research concerning
a)the Italian context of AV media, the advertising situation and its special communication forms, and subsequently
b)the prevalent approaches, data and findings related to the individual areas of language and textuality in cinema, radio and TV in general, as well as their validity for advertising in particular.170
Recent manuals are the only working means where somehow diachronically-oriented overviews on the Italian (and French) language and textuality of the media appear (cf. inter al. Gerstenberg 2006; Helfrich 2006). However, in the Romance language countries, a homogeneous subdiscipline called “Media Linguistics” established programmatically in German speaking areas171, is still in its early stages, although there has been increasing interest in “Language and the Media” since the 1960s (cf. Cortelazzo 1988; Allaire 1990; Helfrich 2006; Osthus 2006). Italy is at the head, where, on the base of the useful terminological differentiation between lingua and linguaggio (dei media), first the language of the press (Dardano 1973), then the language of advertising (cf. Baldini 1987) and finally the language of the Nuovi Media are being given close attention (cf. Antonelli 2011 and earlier contributions in Serianni/Trifone 1994). The reasons for this interest not only lie in the socio economic development towards the famous Berlusconian mediocracy (mediocrazia); on the one hand, they are also anchored in the normative tradition of the questione della lingua and the special consciousness of Italian linguistics for differing developments in both, the varieties and the ideological implications of nowadays Italian (as in analisi del discorso, Antelmi 2006; 2012); on the other hand, I consider them as a result of the close collaboration Italian linguists have with German Romance scholars in receiving specific paradigmatic developments.172
The linguistic discourse on advertising communication focused for a long time on language as the only medium, and, since the 1960s, has constituted its own constant and relatively homogeneous sector, which has remained faithful to the press as the determinant medium. Neglecting the changes on the media market and in media technology, it is devoting itself continuously to the printed or written word. Looked at from a logo centric perspective, a clear literacy norm is thus being retained, although its main lines seem to be constantly corrupted through advertising, especially as this is more and more going to be massively disseminated by audiovisual media. That is probably why, in the early years of the growing information era, a culturally pessimistic attitude was prevailing (inter al. Postman 1985) where advertising – as the “hidden persuaders” (Packard 1961) – was considered pernicious for the masses of people. Thus, advertising language was consequently admonished as an “adulterated” language form, negatively influencing standard language. Consistent with the rapidly increasing consumption of radio and TV, such critical attitudes primarily supported national language ideologies. France reacted with special legislation (for instance, in the relevant paragraphs of the Loi Toubon, cf. Schmitt 1990, dealing with communication in the media); in Italy, criticism gave rise to the nuova questione della lingua (e. g., Pasolini, Calvino; cf. Parlangèli 1971), which considers the manipulative methods of advertising language to be a devaluation of the finally supra regionally developing common lingua italiana (cf. De Mauro 1963). We find a clear reflection of this call to the norm,173 above all supported by the Accademia della Crusca, in the subsequent publications on Italian advertising language, especially those of the 1970s and 1980s (cf. Perugini 1994; Iannucci 1999 and 2006). There, systematic attention is given for the first time to the advertising language phenomena, but there is abundant use of depreciating labels like linguaggio subalterno, linguaggio venduto, lingua in margine alla lingua or uso non normale;174 vocabulary and syntax are said to display the features of a typical fastfood verbale, or they are simply a forgettable linguistic folklore. In short, advertising produces nothing more than fantaparole, as Baldini fittingly summarizes in 1987, referring likewise metaphorically with this word formation to the ephemeral form and meaning processes of a lingua in vendita, a sold out language with no future (Chiantera 1989). However, at the moment when Testa (2000) publishes her study of advertising language, the deliberately ambiguous title of parola immaginata seems to mark a certain turning point: from the 1990s on, advertising language is less a matter of empty phrases or norm-disrupting forms of reduction, but rather a matter of the upcoming awareness that, in connection with the visual, language conveys emotions and, according to the growing need of infotainment, must be exciting and entertaining at any price: through the analysis of advertising linguists are going to reveal how every language system displays its potential for innovation and creativity; how language can be loaded rhetorically, and in which way it becomes iconic on its own (“immaginifica”) and thus can be marked by striking self-referentiality (cf. Kloepfer 1975; Held 2007).
At this point, we have to leave the chronological overview limiting the following outlines to some focal topics which are going to lead to a respective inventory of features at all language levels; above all, it is mainly the lexical level which provides the most striking features. But, linguistic inquiry has meanwhile become more fine-grained: how different the approaches to advertising language can be and, in addition, what different findings come out as a result of further interdisciplinary accesses, this is shown systematically and with enlightening success for German-language research in Janich’s collected papers from 2012. Unfortunately, the publications in Romance linguistics deal with wider spread arguments so that I briefly try to list them in a more traditional way. Advertising language is thus investigated
a)under diachronic vs. synchronic viewpoints, whereby diachronic considerations may commonly introduce synchronic analysis, or are oriented to the history of art and culture (Codeluppi 2000 and 2006; Gerstenberg 2006; Arcangeli 2008; or, for instance, the illustrated compendium by Bargiel 2004);
b)media specifically, whereby the printed forms, above all the classical product ads, and furthermore bills and posters, are the most important objects of analysis;
c)regarding text structure, whereby typical genre-constitutive components are identified: according to their evolution these are mainly the slogan and, with growing importance, the logo and brand names, as well as the increasingly prominent headlines and – more marginally or even lacking – the running text or so-called body copy;
d)regarding text functions where the focus is put above all on persuasion and (hidden) manipulation, so that both, the stylistic choice of register and varieties (cf. Hoffmann 2012), and language creativity and violations of conventional relations between signifiant and signifié are of special interest stimulating the recourse to classical rhetorics;
e)concerning text pragmatics with a special view to argumentative strategies and the organization of speech acts and communicative events (cf. Adam/Bonhomme 1997); a text pragmatic approach is also concerned with deictic anchoring (cf. Held 2009a and b) to given situations; or it attempts to filter out the different markers of relational work between agents and special target groups or is immediately represented by persons appearing in the text (testimonials, personalization);
f)with a focus on genre specificity through identification and description of various subtypes of advertising and particular advertising formats (cf. Pezzini 2006);
g)with a (text-)semiotic approach, whereby the still hesitant view of advertising as a text whole (“image-texte” as Adam/Bonhomme 1997, 11ss. call it) consisting of verbal and nonverbal signs has slowly opened the way to the analytical framework of multimodality (cf. Semprini 1990 and 2003) which considers advertising language mainly in complementary interaction with the visual elements;
h)using so-called “multimedia” or transversal approaches (cf. Reimann 2008), which take into account both the creation of intra- and intermedial campaigns and the constraints of intercultural validity and adaptation to global advertising;
i)within (critical) discourse analysis conceding insights into the ideological content of global marketing as well as into group-specific interests by the use of stereotypes and clichés (e. g., gender, age, status symbolicity, identity markers) or by the communication of ethos likewise in certain judgments and camouflages (e. g., polyphony, (in)direct speech, epistemological markers, mitigation forms and political (in)correctness) (cf. Bendel 2008 and Bendel Larcher 2012; Antelmi 2012).175
Research into advertising in the audiovisual media is of little importance in this general frame. This leaves completely open the increasingly important area of “multimediality” as shown by a diagram taken from Reimann (2008) (cf. Figure 1).
Summing up, this overview of the linguistic research on advertising shows that little has been found on the domains of radio and TV and thus neither music and sound, nor the moving picture176 have been considered in their important role of the production of meaning. Still, no detailed investigations into crossmedia advertising campaigns have been carried out, which – as suggested by Reimann (2008) – by way of a comparison would give insight into communities and differences of the respective media and the potentials of their semiotic resources.
Advertising on radio and TV is mentioned in most research as a specific commercial genre with specific properties and, as we mentioned above, is thus just seen in completion of the print medium (cf. like Sowinski 1979).177 Cinema, in the history of the media certainly the most pertinent precursor of audiovision, is in research so far a nearly completely neglected field. When, in the following, we try to look at the most important findings of linguistic research into advertising with a focus on language, they are drawn from advertising as a text genre in general and as such apply also for the AV media. Only in a second step I will point out in more detail the specific features of advertising language. They will be first inferred from general investigations into AV media language and then secondly be related to the findings of the few existent special research studies.
Common to all advertising texts is their brevity due to the reduction of space and time (cf. Held 2011). Advertising forms in the mass media normally do not stand alone; they rather have a parasitical, or secondary, character (testo ospite, Volli 2003, 13) being attached as an add-on or supplement, or appearing as “insertions” to (main) texts. This nature does not only effect on the text format and its components, but also on its strategic staging with the primordial purpose of making a fast and possibly teasing contact to the dispersive, permanently information-fed recipients: i.e., brief advertising texts not only try for a maximized catchy mediation of the message usually bound to product differentiation (known in the advertising world as USP = unique selling proposition), but must counter the increasing information overload with a clever range of suspense mechanisms and surprise effects by breaking with habitual expectations (cf. possibly the salienza percettiva in Volli 2003, 54; or Polesana 2003 on straniamento and trasgressione). Language reductionism and language manipulation develop accordingly into advertising-constitutive verbal techniques, whose meaning can only be dissolved in the respective interplay with the visual embedding,178 viz. catch visual, key visual, typography and text design (cf. inter al. Stöckl 2004a/b; Held 2007 and 2012).
The recent research into brevitas (cf. Hausendorf 2009; Held/Schwarze 2011) focuses on different ways of text compression. It is a basic characteristic of advertising, which comprises both, its coding and its composition: On the one hand, advertising texts are – in correlation with the growing technological possibilities – so-called “iconic texts”, consisting of interconnected verbal and visual parts, whereby the visual basically attracts the main share of attention supposing language to play a minor role. On the other hand, they consist of genre-constitutive structural components, which are exclusively language determined: there is first of all the slogan – in literal sense the “battle cry” to proclaim the product in public – as the most characteristic part of the ad text; just as important is the name of the product, which, in the course of modern marketing, is turning into the brand label; today it is a stable part of the “logo” which as a complex semiotic construct commonly represents the product image; of increasing importance (and to be clearly distinguished from the slogan!) we furthermore have the headline as the verbal eye-catcher; it mostly links the different parts semantically in its function as a trigger and thus is leading the understanding of the USP; finally, there is (if not lacking like in current aesthetically-oriented print ads) the so-called copy text (in the AV context the voice from the off) which either is pointing out special qualities of the product or is playfully enhancing the emotional frames created in order to raise connotations and thus facilitate decoding. There is no doubt that language must be seen as central in all of these components; any verbal form, however, is not working independently, but reinforces, in close interconnection with the other modes, a though densely produced but quickly recognizable promotional message.
The consequence of these strategically calculated constraints on advertising language can be seen in particular lexico-grammatical phenomena, which are mainly explained and specifically categorized within the issues of rhetoric (cf. Schüler 2012). Seminal studies of advertising language are mostly concerned with the slogan (cf. Baumgart 1992). Later on, according to the growing interest in multimodality, headlines become important research objects (cf. Volli 2003; Schmitz 2007; specifically in tourist advertising Held 2009a and b).
However, with the rise of pragmatic theories, the interest in typical advertising speech acts and their formulation comes into the focus of research (cf. Wüest 2001). On the one hand, attention is paid to the appellative and directive functions of language, and how they can be explained in current models of argumentation (cf. Adam/Bonhomme 1997) and persuasion (cf. the survey in Stöckl 1997). Advertising research is further about the negotiation of imperatives (request to buy) and commissives (promise of profit), the use of indirectness, and the modification of illocutionary force in general. On the other hand, there is an emerging interest in relational features in terms of allocution, address forms, mediating personalization and personal deixis (cf. Held 2009a and b), as well as in dialogue sequences, narration scenarios and the use of frames and frame blending (cf. Ziem 2012) to establish both, affective proximity to the consumer and a concrete contextual anchoring.
Only in this surrounding of various linguistic approaches, which should be complemented through connected disciplines (like psychology, sociology, marketing research etc.), the functional and genre-determined impact of advertising language(s) comes to light. On this background we are going to list out some main characteristics with a special eye to Italian linguistics, for which – as the sources quoted so far have shown – advertising language has been a favorite topic since the 1950s. As may be expected, the main focus lies on lexicon, which includes word formation and thus productive morphological developments; in the area of syntax typical reoccurring structures and types of phrases are noted (cf. Giacomelli 2004); furthermore, there is a debate on retorica della pubblicità emerging, which, while considering rhetorical devices and tropes, makes out exactly the same lexico-grammatical phenomena just under another viewpoint (cf. Spang 1987; Grunig 1990; Magistretti 1998; Iannucci 1999 and 2006). Hence in more detail, what are the most important “stilemi” (to quote Codeluppi) of advertising language that can then be assigned to the broadcast media?
Most publications between the beginnings in the 1960s and the nowadays electronic era agree that advertising language is not an independent variety, but rather a sort of functionally “mixed language”, which endows or even enriches the common standard corpus with certain continually recurring features. These formal characteristics, which are briefly listed in the light of the language system, draw, on the one hand, on the persuasive processing of both the product-specific facts and the lifestyle-oriented framing (like fitness, hedonism, ecology, adventure, escapism, “forever young”, ecc.), and, on the other hand, on the pragmatics of everyday informality and social populism. Perugini perfectly summarizes this complexity of advertising language – not without critical reference to Italian language ideology:
“La componente verbale del messaggio pubblicitario si può quindi definire come la ripresa e la riformulazione di idee e messaggi elaborati in altri ambiti di discorso, che la persuasione pubblicitaria adatta e piega ai propri scopi specifici. La lingua pubblicitaria è una specie di lingua in margine alla lingua, che si pone fuori della norma nel tentativo di rinnovare la propria suggestione e il proprio mordente sul pubblico dei consumatori. Di qui la sua preferenza per la funzione conativa, persuasiva, rispetto alla funzione referenziale, informativa; essa costruisce ‘esche’ linguistiche allettanti ricorrendo alla terminologia prestigiosa di sottocodici tecnici e scientifici e sfruttando o i moduli della lingua colloquiale, con le sue ricordanze, le sue approssimazioni lessicali, la sua sintassi zoppicante, o il registro letterario e aulico con il prestigio tradizionale. I messaggi pubblicitari sono un esempio di ‘lingua venduta’, merce che si spaccia per discorso informativo sulla merce” (Perugini 1994, 605).179
In order to identify the typical features of promotional language as functional entities, knowledge of the sociological background is certainly needed. While linguistics targets particularly the outcomes on different language levels, the praxis of advertising, wherever guidance for language use is given (e. g., Gaede 1981; Lombardi 1998), focuses rather on the rhetorical force of certain items and their potential of attention-getting. In relation to the audiovisual media – more than in the printed matter – language thus has to be treated in the role of a “lingua subalterna” [‘subaltern language’] (as Migliorini describes advertising language as early as 1967, cf. Baldini 1987), as imminent importance is attached to the nonverbal modes, e. g., music, sound, picture, movies, ecc. That is why Perugini points out that any methodology has to take in account the
“parzialità di un approccio esclusivamente linguistico a proposito della comunicazione pubblicitaria, nella quale sono fondamentali, oltre al codice verbale in senso stretto, quello iconico e, nella pubblicità trasmessa dai mezzi audiovisivi, quello fonico. La subalternità della lingua rispetto all’immagine […] è ancora più marcata oggi per il massiccio ricorso al canale televisivo e agli effetti di manipolazione che permette” (Perugini 1994, 606).180
As far as I know, no linguistic research has followed up this assumption systematically; and it comes in a new light only with the multimodality research.181
So the favorite field for the linguistic debate on advertising language is lexis again (initially regarding the slogan). The relevant approaches are of a semantic, functional-stylistic, sociolinguistic and varietal nature, whereby the concept of deviation from a (however defined) standard norm indicates a certain analytical direction (cf. Dittgen 1989). Attention is paid not only to the lexical item per se, but to the part of speech, the field of idiomatics and phraseologisms, and, of course, to word formation. According to Römer, thirteen lexicological categories for the words used in advertising messages can be derived. In Römer’s terminology, they are
“(non-)understandability; polysemy/vagueness; common use vs. neologism; register marking/varieties of style; specialist language; international marking; (un-)motivatedness; center vs. periphery in vocabulary; word-relatedness; judgmental/emotive marking; regional marking; social imprinting” (Römer 2012, 36).182
Some favorite topics in the analysis of product advertising are, above all, the use of language for special purposes (Fachsprache); clichés and keywords; emotionally catching words between denotation and connotation; the role of foreign items and internationalisms with ideological coloring; the overuse of adjectives in the comparative and superlative mode; the exploitation of various registers for social style marking; recently the creation of knowledge frames and frame-switching using isotopies, recurrences and cohesion, accompanied by the activation of cognitive and cultural background (cf. Nielsen 2012; Ziem 2012); the exploitation of phrasemes to create iconicity through resemanticization of obscure meanings (cf. Stöckl 2004a) as well as through the staging of intertextual relations and their bridging and crossing effects (Giacomelli 2004, 235 talks of “trasvalorizzazione semantica”, Desideri 1996 and Desideri/Sannazaro 2012 deal with the same topic as “riuso”). From this enumeration (to a large extent as in Janich 1999/2013), it is possible to see that persuasive product description and product appraisal cannot be left apart when interpreting forms and meaning, so that the same lexical phenomena have also been treated under the viewpoint of rhetoric and stylistics.
In the field of morphology, it is a matter of innovative and creative word formation processes, which are set in motion for both denomination and evaluation of products (often also for brand names). One topic is the overutilized repertoire of prefixes indicating high value (super-, hyper-, mega- etc.), another topic is the mostly improvised word reductions and the so-called parole macedonia (or mixed acronyms); Giacomelli (2004, 235) also identifies so-called parole attaccapanni, “coniati di norma sulla base di strutture, morfemi o lessemi già noti nell’uso” [‘coined usually on the basis of structures, morphemes or lexemes already known in usage’]. Asynthetic composition types, nevertheless formed according to well-tuned patterns, are equally of high interest. All in all, word formation research finds an exemplary field in advertising as it helps to explain systems of productivity and lexicalization patterns with reference to context and cultural knowledge.
In the case of syntactics, the most obvious question is whether a “particular, variety-typical‚ advertising syntax”183 (Thim-Mabrey 2012, 108) is identifiable and, above all, in which text parts of advertising syntactic issues are the subject of debate. Research merely focuses on the economical short sentence forms such as nominal phrases without predicate, elliptic structures, intentionally simplified sentence complexity (parataxis etc.), repetitive, disconnected forms (e. g., adverbial adjectives, Perugini 1994, 608), explaining or evaluating them – as in many cases is done for media syntax per se – functionally as communicative approximations to the characteristics of spontaneously spoken language (anacoluthon, connectives etc.), or as instant patchwork-like disjunctive grammar (Stöckl 1997, 145s.). The linking of syntactic studies to text-pragmatic aspects is favoring an insight into text phorics (anaphor vs. cataphor; the latter is frequent in advertising because of its advancing potential for suspense), the managing of the deictic axes in relation to the personal, temporal and local level; Perugini (1994) mentions, for instance, the employment of the article, of allocutive and inclusive pronouns, the functions of possessives, and the power of a so-called qui “immedesimante”. Furthermore, attention is drawn to the frequent transversality of sentence types and verb tenses (like the indirect imperative, the commissive future), but there is also literature which incorporates prosodic and rhythmic issues in order to make out their influence on the functional sentence perspective and forms of topicalization. From text linguistics comes the debate on narrative and argumentative formulation patterns (esp. Adam/Bonhomme 1997) and on the broad use of different forms of intertextuality (cf. Lugrin 2006; in Desideri 1996 “riuso”).
All the above-mentioned characteristics take on specific functional contours in the light of rhetoric. Research into the rhetorical devices of advertising language is abundant, whereby the line of what is understood as rhetoric reaches from the classic elocutio through the art of enthymematic argument to poetic-ludic plays on words (cf. Janich 1999/2013). We thus have to distinguish the occurrence of classical rhetorical items like figures of speech and tropes – e. g., the creation of a product image through the “rediscovery of the similitude principle”184 (Schüler 2012, 206) – from the advertising technique of rhetorization, which is an intended effect of alienation and surprise through signs by breaking the conventional relationship between signifiant and signifié. Anyway, from the rhetoric point of view, further phenomena are deliberate subjects of analysis: with regard to the different levels of language, in lexis it is a matter of the use of metaphor and metonymy, the playing with polysemy and polyvalence, the exploiting of figurative phraseology and its potential of resemantization. Furthermore, the use of poetic devices such as the favored synaesthesia, etc. (cf. Iannucci 1999 and 2006; Desideri/Sannazaro 2012); syntax targets style deviations breaking down structure and prosody, i.e., climax constructions, repetition, forms of antithesis, modalization and changes of perspective etc. What is central too, is the study of the different impact of puns, which can be staged on the phonetic, semantic and (inter)textual level either in absentia (stimulating the cultural knowledge) or in praesentia (stimulating the conventional text structure) (cf. Kloepfer 1975; Grunig 1990; Desideri 1996; Del Basso 2006).
No matter how the approach to the advertising text with regard to language ensues, it must be identified as a mixed form, as a versatile hybrid at the intersection of text genres and text patterns as well as different registers and styles. Advertising language is regarded as a codice sincretico, i.e., there is no longer – as in earlier times – a search for its features as an exclusive variety, but it is “il risultato della sovrapposizione e della concomitanza di più codici linguistici, del sincretismo fra questi” [‘the result of the superposition and the concomitance of several linguistic codes, of the syncretism between them’] (Giacomelli 2004, 230).
All the enumerated linguistic and rhetorical features of advertising language are relativized with the opening to semiotics (in Italy under the label of the – socially critical – discorso pubblicitario introduced by Eco in 1972) as well as to communication theory where text finally is seen as a complex construction of sense, which comprises
“non solo brani di linguaggio verbale scritti od orali, […] ma anche immagini come disegni e fotografie, filmati ed altri materiali audiovisivi, musiche, animazioni, oggetti elettronici e ipertestuali. Testi, insomma, sono per noi tutti i tipi di messaggi e di segni costituiti sui diversi mezzi di comunicazione, nella loro dimensione oggettiva, riproducibile, ben delimitata. Un testo ha un inizio e una fine, magari stabiliti per caso o per arbitrio del lettore, ma per lo più predisposto dal suo autore. […] Il modo in cui è strutturato, la sua dimensione espressiva, permette di veicolare certi contenuti: è cioè inteso come il frutto di un atto di comunicazione” (Volli 2003, 4).185
Texts are accordingly a network of sense coded through the linking of several sign systems and “decoded” by the recipients’ mostly visually coined literacy experience (Schmitz’s conception of Sehlesen, 2007).
On this basis, the advertising text must be recognized as a semiotic whole comprising visual and verbal sign systems with all their possibilities of configuration and interconnection. In Italian linguistics, this view has remained language-(norm-) centered for a long time, as advertising language is described with the collective term linguaggio,
“un linguaggio che fa ricorso a più codici paralleli; visivo, verbale, oggettuale e, dove possibile (in radio e televisione) tonale e gestuale. La componente strettamente linguistica ha il compito di ancorare il messaggio, di fissare e formalizzare il significato da attribuire all’icona, di per sé ambigua e polisemica, non di rado falsamente ‘naturale’ e rispetto a cui, in un empito didascalico e gnomico, la lingua ha il compito di far ordine” (Giacomelli 2004, 230s.).186
This syncretic conception is still determinant in the research on advertising language (cf. Volli 2003; Testa 2004; Arcangeli 2008; Capozzi 2008), but there is a turn to revisit the various strategie pubblicitarie in deliberate interaction of all codes, on the one hand, with explicit regard to the context and the recipient knowledge, on the other, referring explicitly to the different bearing of the various technical media.
Thus, at least the appropriate theoretical context has been prepared for taking a closer look at advertising in the broadcast media. Arcangeli, for example, already attempts, in contrast to the former research, to build his analyses of the linguaggio pubblicitario on a comparison “tra affissi murali (manifesti vs. poster), annunci cartacei e spot televisivi” [‘between mural bills and posters, print advertisements and TV spots’] (2008, 7). He obviously broadens his data (“qualcosa come centomila réclame” [‘about 100,000 advertisements’]) to different media, limits the quotations, however, to some selected examples without referring to their origin. Other impulses to turn the attention to the “tertiary” media are coming from the emerging media linguistic current in German linguistics applied to the Romance languages: the basis is the analytic framework of the multimodal text – taken from Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and subsequently developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen – in which all codes possess either equal and complementary or additional functions in order to produce a complex (semiotic) unit of communication. Its particular message can not only be described on the basis of the respective code potentials, but must also be substantiated in their specific interplay (cf. Stöckl 2006 and 2011; Roth/Spitzmüller 2007). Taking into account all appearing sign resources in their linguistic relevance (i.e., the phonetic, semantic, syntactic and textual values), a new understanding of text is evolving which seems to be realized exemplarily in the advertising text (Stöckl 2012b; Runkehl 2012).
The following images list the various codes or modes of a text and their semiotic capacity as put together systematically by Stöckl (2006, cf. Fig. 2), and point to the different possibilities of codification in correlation with different media, i.e., print, TV, radio and Internet (Tab. 1).
Even if the multimodal text analysis is still focused on printed ads and their basic configuration, new analytical frameworks are applied in order to face the interplay of language and picture as powerful modes, e. g., all above the theories of “text design” or a “new” visual linguistics (cf. Bucher 2007; Roth/Spitzmüller 2007; Schmitz 1997 and 2007; Große 2011; Diekmannshenke/Klemm/Stöckl 2011). According to Barthes’ differentiation between ancrage and relais (1964, 44), Nöth (2000), on the one hand, and Stöckl (1997; 2004a and b), on the other, develop models of analysis which examine respectively the different forms of mode connection and assert convergence (in terms of addition or complementarity) and divergence (in terms of contrast and violation). Both types approve the agents’ art to build on the cognitive capacity of the recipients to engage in what Stöckl (2004a, 230) calls “explorative Semiose” [‘explorative semiosis’] by putting together the text chunks like resolving a puzzle.
Table 1: Possibilities of codification for advertising in different media genres (Runkehl 2012, 278)187
Whatever the initiatives are, linguistics and communication science have still taken too little notice of how much the development and spread of audiovisual media have influenced the advertising sector from technological, socioeconomic and psychological viewpoints. Coming from institutionally different places of production, advertising is plainly changing in the orientation to a mass dissemination; everything becomes new, the communication formats, the genres and their codification, the frequency, the reception habits and the effects. Thus, promotional language (linguaggio and lingua!) takes on different functions and “design” possibilities in its turn from the monosensorial to the multisensorial distribution, including crossmedial and intermedial diffusion. The advertising spot arises as an innovative, but henceforth basic “funkische Grundform” [‘broadcast form’] (Sowinski 1979, 143), being a “breve messaggio pubblicitario che viene solitamente inserito in trasmissioni radiofoniche o televisive, interrompendone la continuità” [‘short advertising message that is usually inserted in radio or TV broadcasts, interrupting their continuity’] (Treccani n.d.).
We notice even in the English term spot an epitomizing metaphor for the rapid flashy nature of being inserted into the programmatic time schedule of the broadcasts. A spot thus is nothing else but a flashlight on the senses “talora costituito da poche brevi battute” [‘occasionally constituted of few short utterances’], working as a short impression which “altre volte assume la forma di una scenetta comica o di un rapido raccontino” [‘at other times assumes the form of a short funny scene or a quick narration’]. This quotation from the Vocabolario della lingua italiana (<http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario>) indicates not only the quintessence of the new form of broadcast advertising, but refers also to the importance of the (spoken) language as well as to Italian-specific features. Both will require our close attention after a short overview of the social context of AV media.
Before, it has to be briefly mentioned that the rapid development of AV media in Western cultures has brought about a general media competitiveness and media interdependence, which decisively influence the composition of media textuality in general. Not only is the moving picture becoming the leading medium, there is also the impact of the screen – more and more present in living rooms and now on nearly every desk and table – which is going to shape completely new discursive and textual practices. As a consequence, with the beginning of the digital era, in the early 1990s, there is also a significant changing of the press market. To compete with the increasing screen media, the classical black-and-white print papers, meanwhile in crisis, moved into multimodally-designed spectacular scenarios where pictures prevailed and language began to exploit its iconic and indexical character turning quasi into a pictogrammatic system. It seems as if the advertising texture, with all its capturing strategies of structure and style, is significantly involved in this general metamorphosis from which it is itself permanently touched and enriched. Thus, advertising adapts obviously to the media change, nevertheless holding its fundamental nucleus, which incorporates the classical elements of promotion. So even the spot, too, – whether on radio or TV – adheres to this structural basic scheme known from the traditional print ads, but codified and staged in a new multimodal way (cf., inter al., Lo Feudo 2012).
In the following, I am going to discuss – with special regard to the Italian situation – only those criteria which are, in general, peculiar to the audiovisually mediated advertising spot and its language. In the course of this discussion, the complex media situation between the cinema, radio and TV will first be briefly examined chronologically. From a linguistic point of view then, we limit our observations to radio and television, as cinema advertising, specifically, has unfortunately not yet had any closer attention by linguistic research. But the forms of advertising in the cinema, even if particularly scheduled for the wide screen as the “multivision”, are basically very similar to the TV spots.
The socioeconomic evolution of advertising in Western cultures is running more or less parallel from the early printed media over the short period of the (silent) movies to the radio, and then, significantly to the lasting TV era. And yet, the Romance cultures are going their separate ways within that development, especially Italy. Given a cursory glance, the chronological line runs through the 20th century, namely through the early era of artistic forms in the public sphere (comprising the orally “loudly announced” réclame (ital. annuncio) as well as the literal “pubblicità: manifesti, sviluppati in verticale, poster, orizzontali e di grande format” [‘advertising: bills, hung vertically, posters, horizontally and in big format’]; Arcangeli 2008, 7), to the simple advertisements in the (gradually illustrating) printed matter and on the cinema screen (initially stationary, then moving pictures), via the beginnings in radio as the first broadcast medium to the dominating omnipresence on TV (and today in the digital screen media). In the case of Italy, we should note as key data of media history the introduction of radiophony in 1924 through the national institution URI (Unione Radiofonica Italiana), which four years later became the EIAR (Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche) and finally from 1944 changed to the State Radio Station RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane) that still exists today. As early as 1926, with the foundation of SIPRA (Società Italiana Pubblicitaria Radiofonica Anonima), forms of advertising on the radio were officially permitted and supported. The short moment when radio was the only broadcast medium was mainly fulfilled by propaganda aims for fascism and war, nevertheless, the first, very simple forms of advertising spots went over the airwaves (Arcangeli 2008, 18s.) using a written language style:
“Le annunciatrici188 leggevano i communicati durante le pause dei concerti […] senza orari prestabiliti né prezzi fissi. I materiali linguistici […] attingevano palesemente alla nostra tradizione retorico-letteraria più aulica e ricercata …” (Sergio 2004, 31).189
With the arrival of TV in European living rooms from the 1950s, there was a basic change not only in the media situation, but also in advertising. In line with the literature on communication, we can state “la televisione saccheggia tutto” [‘television loots everything’] (Codeluppi 2000, 28), i.e., the rapidly increasing dominance of the “Wahrnehmungsmagnet” television [‘magnet of perception’] (Ludwig 2005, title) has driven the other media – print and radio – into complementary functions with constant adjustment to the technical and socioeconomic innovations of the “piccolo schermo” [‘small screen’] (cf. Alfieri/Bonomi 2008). Radio quickly sunk to the level of a background medium which accompanied daily tasks. To withstand the competition, the print media have noticeably “become illustrated” and turned into “secondary” media in order to comment on and deepen the much faster TV news or to focus on specific target groups and their special interests. Fast forward to the millennium, where the decisive steps in the development of the mainstream medium TV and its spread to the masses – which is still uninterrupted today – are the following: the national institutionalization with (ultimately) three programs (RAI 1, RAI 2 1961, RAI 3 1979); the change from (purely informative) black-and-white TV to (emotionalizing) color TV and the internationalization through the setting-up of satellite TV; further the introduction of regional and – from the 1980s on – private TV stations together with the increasing commercialization (the national stations of RAI had to compete seriously with Berlusconi’s Fininvest and the new channels Canale 5, Italia 1, Rete 4, as well as with his new private advertising giant Publitalia); plus finally cable TV, digitalization and personalization (cf. Menduni 2002; Nacci 2008). According to the statement that “Il mondo della pubblicità fu davvero rivoluzionato dall’arrivo della televisione” [‘the world of advertising was truly revolved by the arrival of television’] (Codeluppi 2002, 20), the media change has effectively had an immense influence on the development and the institutionalization of the advertising business as a whole; in the course of the last 50 years an enormous increase in the spread and frequency of advertising has taken place; means and forms of advertising textuality have been constantly differentiated and optimized. In fact, from the early sponsoring of certain programs190 borrowed from the USA, there was a rapid change to the perfecting of spots – already known from radio and the cinema – which as flashy insertions into the regular program (ital. palinsesto) thus became the main advertising genre of the TV era.
Italy, however, developed its very own transmission concept: the so-called “Carosello”, which monopolized TV advertising from 1957 to 1974 as a specific and highly watched program item. Anchored still today in the collective cultural memory, it has coined in its form and ideological content its own Italian “linguaggio della pubblicità”, which has essentially determined the spread of Italian as the common language over the whole country. By “Carosello” we understand a fixed advertising block, which runs at set times quasi as a preview before main programs (e. g., the telegiornale). It comprises a certain number of exactly timed single spots played down repeatedly as a “merry-go-round”. Every spot is separated visually by the siparietto and is thus regulated in structure and content consisting of
“una scenetta o storiella di apertura […] dalla durata variabile (tra i 65 e i 115 secondi) nella quale non poteva essere nominato il prodotto reclamizzato; e un codino di chiusura, di 35 secondi al massimo, in cui il prodotto faceva finalmente la sua comparsa verbale e/o fattuale” (Arcangeli 2008, 24).191
Apart from the fact that almost all members of Italy’s cultural community actively participate either in the creation, script writing or production of many spots or appear as stars to give testimonials (cf. Codeluppi 2000; Manetti 2006; Arcangeli 2008; Wikipedia), “Carosello” turned into a most popular daily meeting point; hence, the masses assisted with the development of a repertoire of hybrid text genres which drew on the actual cultural pool, giving it new life in staged mini-scenarios, sketches and punch lines; simple everyday episodes – which in the banal logic of advertising was simply about finding defects and helping to mend them – entered in clever narrative scenes or pseudo-dialogues with entertaining battute, and were skillfully represented through fictive figures or paid actors. Whilst the first part of the spot is all about the creative movie scenarios with the use of pictures, sound and language which are the closest to reality, the codino as the repetitive part is consolidating the typical phenomena of advertising, above all there are the catchy acoustic language of the slogan, the symbolic construction of the brand name in connection with the usual devices like jingles, specific sound effects, settings, iconic and indexical signs, logos etc., which are bound to be recognized and memorized – in short, there is a cluster of those language forms which are characteristic of “thrilling” advertising. Their value is less relevant to business than to supporting a specific popular culture, which had an incomparable effect on the development of the lingua italiana as a colloquial language in general. Spina (2006) even goes so far as to see in “Carosello” the most efficient “scuola di lingua” [‘language school’], which, in the 1970s, not only enabled the spread of a general Italian standard speech, but also functioned as a unique, sociocultural “specchio delle varietà dell’italiano” [‘mirror of the varieties of Italian’] (Spina 2006, 155ss.).
The regional differentiation of television and subsequently the privatization of the TV broadcasting stations ended the era of “Carosello”-driven advertising entertainment. There follows the turn to the total commercialization of television, whereby advertising constantly and with increasing frequency pervades the whole program of broadcasts as the most important source of income and is officially accepted as the very financial power instance (data on Publitalia in Brigida/Francia/Di Vesme 1993, 185ss.). The fixed structure of the “Carosello” form of advertising had thus long been broken down in time and space. The necessary shortening of the spot to even more rapid flashlights is accompanied by an increasing compression of action and codes, achieved by even cleverer semiotic linking and staging: the messages are to be passed on as quickly as possible, as often as possible, as lifestyle-embracing and as “spectacularly” as possible (cf. Held 2012) to the zapping, always transient consumers. To increase the economic effect, certain groups are targeted according to the time of day and program content; further product areas are finely tuned; even services (like tourism, transport, banking, technology, energy, politics, etc.) and social institutions (cf. Arcangeli 2012a and b) become worthy of advertising; media complementarity, remediation, exact planning of multi-media distribution, specific campaign design and growing internationalization – all these issues meanwhile increasingly characterize the global field of postmodern TV advertising culture, which is further developing the open diversity of complex “syncretic” broadcasting forms and constantly optimizing them according to the public taste and demands of the market.
In this broad spectrum of changing advertising practices, language maintains its proven role as the indispensable element we have showed sufficiently above. But nevertheless, as different media match different forms of output, some new issues in linguistic research are emerging. In the following, I try to give a short overview on what has been done on advertising language under the viewpoint of the three media, viz. radio, film and TV. Because of their inseparable interaction in the 20th century – the rise and decline, but also the reciprocal complementarity, overlap and remediation – they can be treated together.
As we have already said, the scarce linguistic attention to audiovisual advertising is in complete contradiction to its omnipresence and globality. Nevertheless, there are some publications in the linguistic field of the individual philologies (of different standards) which examine the language of the respective media in general. There have been some appropriate studies in Italian linguistics since the late 1970s (cf. the overview in Gerstenberg 2006; Helfrich 2006), whereby mostly it becomes clear from the title, through the distinction between lingua di X vs. linguaggio di X, whether we can expect an orientation which tends more to the language system or more to the semiotic whole. Hence, for both radio and TV we find Menduni (2002); Maraschio (1997) treats the language on the radio, but also do Atzori (2002 and 2008) and the contributors in the 1997 volume edited by Accademia della Crusca; especially for TV there are Diadori (1994), Sorice (2002), Nacci (2003), Grignaffini (2004), Alfieri (2005), Alfieri/Bonomi (2008; 2012), Mauroni/Piotti (2010) and D’Achille (2012); for the cinema we find just two publications by Raffaelli (1992 and 1994). Further reports on the language in AV media are to be found in connection with the storia della lingua italiana (cf. De Mauro 1963). These again credit the media with the important role in Italianization, especially in the development of a neo-standard and the uso medio, but also in the discussion with respect to a general media variety (cf. Dardano 42002). Another important area lies in dealing with the above-mentioned italiano trasmesso and its position between written and oral language (cf. Coveri/Benucci/Diadori 1998; Losi 2007).
In general, all these publications end in a description of the most important lexico-grammatical features, which are explained sociolinguistically or with reference to varieties. In the context of text linguistics and text pragmatics, work is also recently being done on the identification of specific genres and formats (generi radiofonici/generi televisivi), but also of their hybrids and the different mediating forms of the text actions and text functions. Nevertheless, despite all concerns with language, the fact of code diversity will not be forgotten. The AV media commonly use a linguaggio sincretico, which should be taken into account at any price. It must be noted that in all these studies there is no relation to advertising; if wanted, its characteristic features have to be extracted from them keeping in mind the findings printed advertisement has filtered out as the leading medium.
Nevertheless, in the context of the media-specific debate on language and text, there are initial and somehow pioneering studies to be found, which can not be left out in this overview. They come out, surprisingly, in the field of radio and are completely in agreement that they are going to “open up” virgin territory. In 1999, there appeared a book entitled “La parola via etere” [‘Words through the ether’] by Cacciari/Micciancio, which went into the characteristics of pubblicità radiofonica from the viewpoint of communication theory. Though many media-specific features of the radio format are for the first time systematically described, it was not the purpose of this study to introduce a corpus for linguistic analysis. The first empirically-based study of radio advertising comes from French linguistics.192 Under the title “La publicité radiophonique” [‘Radiophonic advertising’], Geneviève Bender-Berland (2000) offers a comparative analysis of French and German advertising spots, extracting many different lexical and morphosyntactic features, and not in any way forgetting distinguishing paraverbal features such as pitch, intonation, accent and rhythm. In 2004, a comparable study, published by Giuseppe Sergio, appeared under the title “Il linguaggio della pubblicità radiofonica” [‘The language of radiophonic advertising’]. In the tradition of Italian linguistics, it unfortunately remains confined to the identification of verbal phenomena, but defines these within the conflictual area between oral and written language as typical features of an oralità trasmessa. Sergio’s volume contains – the only one to do so – a 200-page-long, written transcription of a data corpus, which indeed more than sufficiently documents his findings, but is again not suitable for further use. Bender-Berland substantiates her data with selected transcribed examples in an appendix (2000, 243ss.). For TV advertising, systematic investigations of this kind are surprisingly still completely lacking in Romance language research.
Accordingly, linguistic insights into advertising discourse in AV media must rely on the interdisciplinary research in this area. The language results of the three publications will therefore be summarized in the following wider context of media studies.
The oldest broadcasting medium is the radio. But despite its almost century-old history, it is at the same time the least researched. Apart from the scarce studies quoted above, the linguistic debate on radio advertising is generally seen as a “blind spot” in media research (Stöckl 2007 and 2011). This is the more astonishing as radio is commonly said to be a unique medium of “acoustic art” [‘akustische Kunst’] (Häusermann 2005, 159), in which the spoken word takes on new “audible” dimensions, which open promising perspectives for linguistic research, above all for the pragmatics of spoken language.
In fact, the spoken broadcast (at the beginning there was just music programming) was the basic transmission, but it quickly produced different formats for certain types of speaking, which Sowinski (1979, 141) identifies as officially read speech (e. g., in news programs), documentary speech (e. g., in feature reports) and fictive speech (e. g., in radio plays). The different shades between reality-related and somehow artificial forms of speech have today long become hybrid and mingled. Thus, the radio formats, and especially the advertising spot, must be of more interest to linguists because of the interplay of various acoustic potentialities. Despite the monosensory canal, radio in fact mediates not only verbal, but increasingly well-designed multimodal texts (cf. Stöckl 2007). Language plays a complex role there: it develops, on the one hand, as a “diamesic variety” with specific lexico-grammatical properties and their rhetorical exploitation in order to color and recreate a certain situational context; on the other hand, it also transports paraverbal modalities like pitch, rhythm, speaking pace, intonation, accentuation etc., matching “personalization” and performativity. Speech and voice are thus completed by music and sound effects in all their facets. It is the complex, nuance-rich sound design which gives radio, with its lack of visualization, nevertheless a high “visual power”. Quite rightly, Stöckl (2007) labels radio advertising as “Kino für das Ohr” [‘cinema for the ear’]. Radio is de facto emotionally attractive; it accompanies daily life by the by, but permanently, creating in this way an almost indispensable relationship of intimacy and community feeling with the addressees. Although it may be transient and time-bound, “radio links spaces, it fills spaces with its own means, it creates new spaces”193 (Häusermann 2005, 161s.), remaining all the while independent and autonomous.
Following Cacciari/Micciancio (1999), we may define the broadcast talk accordingly as the perfect output of a “linguaggio”
“che stimola l’immaginazione e la creatività umana attraverso una girandola di suoni, rumori, silenzi, parole dette e cantate, dove l’analogia e l’anamorfosi evocano un’iconicità e un rimando ad immagini mentali, che attirano l’attenzione, divertono, illustrano e seducono l’ascoltatore. Forse è per questo che la radio esercita un fascino che permane inossidato ancora oggi, l’epoca della multimedialità e delle tecnologie avventuristiche, in quanto conserva funzioni di intrattenimento, informazione e compagnia, scandisce i nostri ritmi quotidiani, ci accompagna in casa, in auto, al bar o al lavoro, si insinua sottilmente nelle nostre attività senza che noi spesso ce ne possiamo rendere conto” (Presentazione del volume).194
Hence, radio speech opens many fields for linguistic investigation: e. g., discourse genres, speech events and speech registers according to the target, program design, the role of language and style in complement to sound and music. Some aspects are dealt with in Menduni (2002) in connection with media history and its rapid change. The remaining sporadic research in Italian studies is dedicated to the language of radio as “trasmesso tra scritto e parlato” [‘transmitted between written and spoken’] (Atzori 2008, 33), seeing in it, as already mentioned, an appropriate field to observe some typical processes of modern Italian. Starting from Sabatini’s plea in 1997 for the acceptance of the spoken language as a supraregionally developing uso medio and the identification of italiano trasmesso as oralità secondaria (cf. Ong 1987), a linguistic discourse is emerging which studies the parlato radiofonico from two points of view: considering both monological and dialogical formats, a mixture of tendencies is realized, on the one hand to literary language, on the other to everyday spoken language. To underscore the distinctions, reference is made to the paradigm of conceptionality (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1990) by defining broadcast talk in relation to parameters of intimacy vs. distance as
“linguaggio multiforme che ha diversi stili a seconda dei programmi; un linguaggio dal doppio statuto che può essere un parlato-scritto che condivide i tratti della scrittura dei media o un parlato-parlato vicino all’interazione faccia a faccia” (Atzori 2008, 38).195
In the light of the conceptional framework, Nencioni’s model (1976), and the terms he created to relate to the different degrees of parlato, is reinforced. Altogether, the discourse reflects the historically-determined efforts Italian linguistics made to spread and nurture the status and prestige of Italian towards an everyday standard language, and is less preoccupied with the functional characteristics of the broadcast medium. Because of the lack of context, mimicry and gesture broadcast talk is commonly criticized as artificiosità; hardly any importance has been accorded to the dramaturgically so significant compensation modes like prosody, pitch or music and the background noise:
“La percezione della radio è lineare e la comunicazione volatile; l’ascoltatore non può tornare indietro e riprendere ciò che non ha sentito o capito; poiché si utilizza solo il canale uditivo, i tempi di attenzione sono limitati e l’ascolto può essere distratto, in quanto contemporaneo ad altre attività. Per questi motivi […] il linguaggio radiofonico deve tendere soprattutto alla comprensibilità, attraverso la conseguenza logica e la semplicità espressiva. I testi devono rispettare i tempi radiofonici, perseguendo la brevità e la selezione delle informazioni” (Atzori 2008, 36).196
With this obvious orientation towards supraregional standardization, Italian linguistics takes up a contrary position to the above-mentioned merits of radio as an everyday companion which stimulates imagination and creativity merely because of its just acoustic character.
Both points of view will be brought into the existing linguistic debate on radio advertising in the well-established form of the radio spot. Sergio’s study (2004) remains committed to the concept of oralità radiofonica (Ch. 4) and identifies distinctive features of the lexicon and syntax as well as rhetorical devices in a well-transcribed corpus of approximately 200 comunicati radiofonici from Radio RAI 1 and Radio DeeJay. As indicated above, most lexical and rhetorical devices (figure di parola, di pensiero e tropi) almost prototypically represent the well-known advertisement issues; the syntactic items (like frasi monoproposizionali, sintassi segmentata, incisi, discorso diretto riportato, che polivalente) point to the prevalence of spoken language and its characteristic Italian outcomes. However, by comparing data from the public broadcasting company with a private one, Sergio commonly tends to determine radio language according to the “grado di dipendenza dallo scritto” [‘degree of dependence of the written’] (2004, 336). The empirically complicated investigations contribute nothing basically new, neither for the determination of the spot as a commercial genre, nor for specific multimodal strategies, nor do they shed further light on the specifically Italian debate of orality vs. literacy. The final remarks, according to which an
“agile informalità e semplicità delle parti mimetiche e di converso una maggiore progettazione di chiara matrice scritta, per quelle diegetiche” (Sergio 2004, 340).197
is shown, confirm this impression. The meticulous study neglects both the acoustic appeal that radio generally offers the transient listener, and its particular qualities, which especially in advertising are frequently exploited, in permanent repetition and by a broad range of dramaturgical tonality. Though a semiotica della pubblicità (Volli 2003) is presently becoming established in Italian, semiotic or multimodal approaches are not considered within this traditional language approach.
Opening the framework from purely verbal to paraverbal aspects, the somewhat earlier198 research by Bender-Berland (2000) contributes much more to the specific nature of publicité radiophonique, here comparatively on French and German radio stations:
“En effet, tel que nous l’entendons, le message publicitaire radiophonique ne se limite pas seulement à un message verbal. Il s’agit bien d’un texte tout court, d’une centaine de mots au maximum, mais il est entouré, ponctué, souligné par des inserts musicaux, des chansonnettes, des bruitages divers. Ces éléments paratextuels ont, bien entendu, leur importance et une influence sur le texte lui-même […] en tant qu’entité cohérente” (Bender-Berland 2000, 3).199
Under the chapter heading “L’entourage du texte”, Bender-Berland outlines the textstructural, semantic and text-functional performance of the voice(s) in the spots and studies the music (especially the function of the jingles as catchy tunes with a high recognition factor) and the background noise (bruitage). She then builds her linguistic research on the structures prosodiques (intonation, pauses, accent), the structures textuelles (above all forms of morphosyntactic cohesion and deixis), further on the coherence-creating stratégies lexicales (above all nomination and reprise nominale), as well as on the structures lexico-sémantiques. The instruments of advertising language are thus interpreted from a text pragmatics framework, which leads to a better understanding of the media specificities. Even though attention is paid merely to the information and argumentation character, the comparative analysis nevertheless leads to findings of both, the different capacities of the two language systems (like for French the presentative passe-partout function of ça, of various determinatives and other anaphoric or cataphoric instruments) and of semantic cohesion means, as well as the ways of creating a rhetorical impact with the aim to attract the attention of the broad mass of incidentally listening recipients.
Linguistic research cannot really do justice to the priority of these functions, which the producers of radio advertising spots, not only in the structural “design” but also in the exploitation of the acoustic codes, were able to make more and more perfect in competition with TV. It is only with the use of the multimodal paradigm, where all modalities have to be examined for their respective potential and then described in specific interaction, that the spot on radio and TV can be suitably recognized as a semiotic whole, thus effectively counteracting the “visual deficit” of this highly complex area of research. Stöckl (2007; 2011; 2012b) makes some initial suggestions in this regard, but they have not yet found any reaction in Romance linguistics. By developing a storyboard-like audio transcript, thus being minutely divided up in a notation of seconds into the respective sign modalities (language – voice – music – sound effect), Stöckl succeeds for the first time in transferring the multimodality approach from the printed “picture-text” to the auditive plot. By describing the media-specific capacities of the modalities he traces their intermodal links step by step so that the relation to the meaning of the actual message (USP) unfolds more or less of its own accord.200
The TV spot is even more complex, rich in functions and meaning-making by way of the additional picture code and its growing range of technical possibilities. This appears to frighten off researchers; as far as I know, not one single linguistic monograph, at least in Romance research, is devoted to the subject.
It is, however, worth noting the German study by Wyss (1998) on advertising spots from Swiss TV. Being rather a cultural approach to the TV spot, nevertheless, there are some stimulating ideas for linguistics. Wyss works out a good definition of the spot as a commercial television text (25ss.). For her, the media specificity of the spot lies in its existence as an “intertext” to the television genres in general, i.e., we are talking about forms of imitation (“mimicry”), adaptation, integration and the popular restaging of reality, as television basically creates it in its
“complexity through the simultaneity of the written (still or moving) and oral (spoken, sung) verbal texts, the verbal and nonverbal codes, the moving/animated and the still pictures”201 (Wyss 1998, 20).
Television – and within it the advertising spot – must accordingly be seen as a discursive “text montage” [‘Montage von Texten’] (1998, 23), which literally represents, or simulates, a “universe of symbolic action” [‘Universum symbolischen Handelns’] (ibid.), or a permanent “imaginative world” [‘Vorstellungswelt’] (ibid.). This complex production of sense is marked, on the one hand, by brevity, fragmentedness and surrogates, on the other, it is due to a technically-complicated codification with a wide multimodal range. The great demands made on the producers and recipients of screen textuality seem to have an effect on language research, too, which is only sporadically confronting TV communication at all, and in consequence, TV advertising is not a systematically-analyzed subject. The result is that future researchers are obliged to gather linguistic questions on TV commercials from advertising handbooks and culture-critical essays, like that of Manetti (2006), from the general literature on print ads and, as in the case of the radio, from the – still not very abundant – discussion of a lingua della televisone (Caprettini 1996; Alfieri/Bonomi 2008 and 2012; Gili 2012) or rather: a linguaggio televisivo (Menduni 2002; Volli 2003). Furthermore, in the absence of specific publications, we should also realize that the audiovisual spot appears not only on the TV set, but also on the cinema screen; both have many properties in common.
Though being the first audiovisual medium that precedes television chronologically and technically, the movies are today largely subordinate to it in expansion and function. In the digital era, they seem to be completely losing their importance. And yet, cinema advertising is the father of the commercial spot in its highly effective, multisensorily mediated mimetic character. As early as the 1920s, cinemas had gone over to filling the period before and between longer films with promotion (cf. Sowinski 1979, 146ss.). The initially poster-like slides were quickly accompanied by music and offscreen voices. Since the 1950s, short commercial films with a spoken text and sentimental background music have replaced the simple static insertions. Their success stands and falls with the great appeal of the cinema culture in the American style; with the possibility of its regional and target-specific tailoring (mainly to a young generation), with the audience’s willingness to concentrate their attention and, above all, with the emotional attunement to a fictive world; all these are factors which only the full size and the full sound of the wide screen were able to communicate. The advertising film was thus effectively used for a fascinating demonstration of products and contributed in many business branches to a nearly global recognition of product images (cf. Janich 1999/2013). As central as the value of the cinema from the viewpoint of artistic production and mass reception in Italy was, above all between the 1960s and 1990s, so slight was the attention paid to it by linguistics. Film language was again only interesting with a view to Italianization and the identification of a specific lingua filmata (Raffaelli 1992) as a special form of italiano trasmesso, i.e., in order to make out a particular variety special characteristics of a parlato cinematografico (e televisivo) (Raffaelli 1994) had to be found. A certain interest is taken in the phenomenon of doppiaggio (synchronization) (cf. Maraschio 1982) which in its form as didascalie scritte is discussed in relation to the original version.
For the multiform communication of advertising, as it hits its technological and highly appealing peak in the era of television, there is little to be learned from these studies. Further Italian publications on “lingua e stili comunicativi nei generi televisivi” [‘language and communicative styles in television genres’] (cf. the subtitle of Alfieri/Bonomi 2008) also only mention the advertising spot superficially. In the chapter “l’italiano ibiridato dell’intrattenimento” [‘the hybridized Italian of entertainment’] in Alfieri/Bonomi (2012, 95ss.), there is a mention of pubblicità as a paragenere which shows that first genre-specific arguments find their way into the repeated view on typical developments of modern Italian. Advertising is seen as a special form of television entertainment, where la scenetta impersonata202 and various modalità narrative predominate: they follow certain structures consisting of lead and codino with a slogan, and are especially rich in adjectives (“prevale l’aggettivazione sollecitante”, Alfieri/Bonomi 2012, 98) and foreign words (internationalisms). The linguaggio della pubblicità is therefore described as a “linguaggio trasversale […] afferrabile in base alle fasce orarie della messa in onda in base al target prefigurato” [‘transversal language […] comprehensible on the basis of the broadcast schedule based on the prefigured target audience’] (ibid.). With this remark the authors point to the essential, extralinguistic features of TV advertising: its time limits, its place within the chain of spots and, absolutely decisive, its position in the palinsesto (cf. also Diodato 2006), i.e., in the TV program with regard to the time of day and, consequently, with regard to the supposed target group (e. g., evening prime times are more costly and guarantee a large number of spectators). So, quite unexpectedly in the face of the negative balance regarding the linguistics of AV media, we find the first typological suggestions of specific advertising genres and, in consequence, the first remarks on special language features (the most prominent is the so-called italiano “oralizzato”):
“Si molteplicano anche le tipologie di messaggio pubblicitario [sic!]: allo spot e al promo si affiancava la televendita (proposta di acquisto per via telefonica), il billboard (invito o ringraziamento per l’ascolto in testa o in coda a un programma), e il diario (comunicato di 5 secondi che apre il break nel quale si succedono i vari spot)” (Alfieri/Bonomi 2012, 96).203
And, accurately in the wider context of Italian text linguistics, which is tendentially judged as being receptive, we find an innovative collection of papers entitled “Trailer, spot, clip, siti, banner. Le forme brevi della comunicazione audio-visiva” [‘Trailer, spot, clip, site, banner. The short forms of audiovisual communication’] (Pezzini 2006). In this volume, other commercial text types beside the spot are for the first time identified, defined and exemplarily described. In addition to the items mentioned in the title, the video clip and the so-called cliffhanger are also dealt with. What all these promotional forms have in common can be seen in the common English names which underline the flash-like brevity appropriate to the little time available for catching the attention of the recipients; therefore, they are all “icone dense, sature di energia, di ritmo e di forza espressiva” [‘dense icons, saturated with energy, rhythm and expressive force’] (cover text) which as striking features influence the text structure, the text design and its multimodal codification. Though there is unfortunately very little real data evidence, it is absolutely pioneering to make account of so far little-noticed advertising formats. Having indeed reached autonomous dimensions in nowadays television programs, they have a common appellative-evaluative core, thus forming a specific, intermedially-operating network of texts. Even the commercial spot, which I have tried to define from different viewpoints as a basic notion, gets a new shape when – as Peverini does – it is put in relation to the (video) clip, with which it shares common features through its
“capacità di tradurre in una forma accattivante il ritmo di un brano musicale, selezionando e rielaborando soluzioni narrative o stilistiche preesistenti. Ibrida per eccellenza, combina un’estrema flessibilità del linguaggio con una straordinaria capacità di adattamento a contesti di fruizione differenti, scavalcando la dimensione del palinsesto televisivo e invadendo i territori dell’agire quotidiano” (Peverini 2004, cover text; cf. also Peverini 2006; Cattaneo/Forgione 2006).204
Let us briefly look to the other commercial AV genres which today are certainly of high use in the Internet (e. g., YouTube, etc.). The trailer, or ital. promo, fr. bande annonce, is, by way of contrast, “un breve filmato promozionale di un film di prossima uscita” [‘a short promotional film piece for a movie soon to be released in theaters’] (Dusi 2006, 32), i.e., originally an advertising form for cinema films, now used for making advance publicity for TV films or even as the run-in to the film itself. With the concept of a banner (“flag” or “pennant”) we understand a – mostly animated – ribbon-like web advertising, which flashes briefly and quickly onto the screen (comparable to pop-ups) or crosses the screen unexpectedly. The cliffhanger is, as the metaphorical labelling suggests, a film device much used in serials: it is usually the intentional breaking off before a punch line or the outcome of a plot line at the end of a puntata. This creates tension and keeps the audience on standby, ready to watch the next episode, but it is also used in advertising. Characteristic of all these screen-made genres is brevity, the speed of consumption, the fragmentary nature of content and the use of code-mixing and code-blending (cf. Held 2011); for those very reasons, they have to be semantically teasing, but are thus well-designed patterns. Their character and appearance is basically visual by moving pictures; language is bound on written-graphic elements.
Altogether, this text-based approach reveals not only diversity, dynamism and mutual exchange in the range of commercial genres within AV media, but gives also insight into virgin research areas, where linguists still have much to do in order to study the role language plays in connection with the audiovisual resources and their conditions.
A further still completely open field for research in linguistics is “multimediality” (as understood by Reimann 2008) and with it the crossmedially spanned “multi-issue” advertising campaigns of global extension. They turn out to be media-specific serial forms, using texture and codes to be varied programmatically in certain periods. This is where advertising as subject of intercultural communication and research has to be concerned with questions of cultural adaptation, translation and translatability. In all these and still many more contexts, we can see that, despite the nowadays completely dominant role of the Internet, broadcast media are still playing a major role in mass dissemination and thus have an unbroken importance for spreading and divulging the seducing world of commercial marketing.
To conclude the presentation of research into AV advertising, it is not surprising to realize that there are few or hardly any data corpora that are accessible and utilizable for linguistic research. In Spina (2000 and 2006) and De Mancini-Himmrich (2006), we learn about the Corpus di Italiano Televisivo (CIT), a data bank of approximately 500,000 occurrences in five format categories. Advertising, i.e., spots and the like, accounts for the smallest number (approximately 40,000 / 260 spots). It is true that there are links to CIT on the homepages of the Accademia della Crusca and on those of the Società di Linguistica Italiana, but direct access to the database does not seem to be possible, and so the usefulness of the transcribed and annotated data is for me not verifiable. Public advertising archives, like, for example, the Regensburger Archive for Research into Advertising (RAW), which is historically and intermedially oriented (cf. Reimann 2012), were not at my disposal, neither for France or Italy. There are numerous retrievable spot collections on YouTube, which can be found with the help of the search engines under specific companies or products (e. g., <http://www.culturepub.fr>). There is also no lack of more or less well-filled websites or blogs regarding slogans (for instance, <http://www.ideeslogan.com>) or certain advertising campaigns. But, among the online links, there is no useful approach recognizable, which could be exploited for any kind of systematic research work. Advertising is creative matter, protected by copyright, and it is not put at public disposal by the companies for general use. Hence, in both language cultures, Italian and French, there is a lot of pioneering work to be done for both documentation and analysis of radio as well as of TV commercials.
To sum up, the bottom line for linguistic research into AV media in general and into advertising communication in particular is as follows: descriptive language and text analyses are dominant; useful empirical data is completely lacking; many methodological approaches, such as the discourse-analytical or the corpus linguistic ones, are still little applied. And yet, recent linguistic studies give clear signs of a paradigmatic shift from advertising language to advertising textuality and thus from simple verbal to complex textual means. The initially critical debate, in which language is a matter of the sociolinguistic classification and the evaluation of the diasystematic varieties, is swinging round into the functionally-oriented description of the stylistic and rhetorical potentialities of the language system. From this point, the way is leading to the awareness of media texts as multimodally staged communicative units, whereby technical channel, technological tools and time-space limitation evoke a structural design(ing) and a semantic density, in which language now as ever plays a fundamental role. Media linguistics as a still emerging discipline is thus going to be continuously confronted with a wide range of future perspectives.
Accademia della Crusca (ed.) (1997), Gli italiani trasmessi. La radio, Firenze, Accademia della Crusca.
Adam, Jean M./Bonhomme, Marc (1997), L’argumentation publicitaire. Rhétorique de l’éloge et de la persuasion, Paris, Nathan.
Alfieri, Gabriella (2005), L’italiano “alla” televisione: prodromi per un’analisi stilistica per generi, Lingua italiana d’oggi 2, 353–400.
Alfieri, Gabriella/Bonomi, Ilaria (edd.) (2008), Gli italiani del piccolo schermo. Lingua e stili comunicativi nei generi televisivi, Firenze, Cesati.
Alfieri, Gabriella/Bonomi, Ilaria (2012), Lingua italiana e televisione, Roma, Carocci.
Allaire, Suzanne (1990), Sprache und Massenmedien, in: Günter Holtus/Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. V.1: Französisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 211–224.
Antelmi, Donella (2006), Il discorso dei media, Roma, Carocci.
Antelmi, Donella (2012), Comunicazione e analisi del discorso, Roma, UTET.
Antonelli, Giuseppe (2011), Lingua, in: Andrea Afribo/Emanuele Zinato (edd.), Lingua in modernità italiana, Roma, Carocci, 15–52.
Arcangeli, Massimo (2008), Il linguaggio pubblicitario, Roma, Carocci.
Arcangeli, Massimo (2012a), I media italiani, l’italiano dei media, in: Marcello Aprile (ed.), Lingua e linguaggi dei media, Roma, Aracne, 13–52.
Arcangeli, Massimo (2012b), Pubblicità sociale ed elettorale in Italia. Storia, teoria, prassi, in: Paola Cotticelli/Elke Ronneberger-Sibold (edd.), Il linguaggio della pubblicità italiano e tedesco: teoria e prassi/Italienische und deutsche Werbesprache: Theorie und Praxis, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 17–44.
Atzori, Enrica (2002), La parola alla radio, Firenze, Cesati.
Atzori, Enrica (2008), La lingua della radio, in: Gabriella Alfieri/Ilaria Bonomi (edd.), Gli italiani del piccolo schermo. Lingua e stili comunicativi nei generi televisivi, Firenze, Cesati, 33–66.
Baldini, Massimo (ed.) (1987), Le fantaparole. Il linguaggio della pubblicità, Roma, Armando.
Bargiel, Réjane (2004), 150 ans de publicité, Paris, Musée de la publicité.
Barthes, Roland (1964), Rhétorique de l’image, Communications 4, 40–51.
Baumgart, Manuela (1992), Die Sprache der Anzeigenwerbung. Eine linguistische Analyse aktueller Werbeslogans, Heidelberg, Physika.
Behrens, Gerold (1996), Werbung: Erklärung, Entscheidung, Gestaltung, München, Vahlen.
Bendel, Sylvia (2008), Werbestrategien hinterfragen statt reproduzieren – Plädoyer für eine kritische Wissenschaft, in: Gudrun Held/Sylvia Bendel (edd.), Werbung – grenzenlos, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang, 229–244.
Bendel Larcher, Sylvia (2012), Werbekommunikation diskursanalytisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 229–243.
Bender-Berland, Geneviève (2000), La publicité radiophonique. Analyse linguistique de messages publicitaires français et allemands, Hamburg, Buske.
Blumenthal, Peter (1983), Semantische Dichte. Assoziativität in Poesie und Werbesprache, Tübingen, Niemeyer.
Brigida, Franco/Francia, Laura/Di Vesme, Paolo (1993), La pubblicità in Italia. Il mercato, i mezzi, le ricerche, Milano, Lupetti.
Bucher, Hans-Jürgen (2007), Text-Design und Multimodalität. Zur Semantik und Pragmatik medialer Gestaltungsformen, in: Kersten S. Roth/Jürgen Spitzmüller (edd.), Textdesign und Textwirkung in der massenmedialen Kommunikation, Konstanz, UVK, 49–77.
Burger, Harald (1990 [1984]), Sprache der Massenmedien, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter.
Cacciari, Cristina/Micciancio, Valentina (1999), La parola via etere, Milano, Angeli.
Capozzi, Maria Rosa (2008), La comunicazione pubblicitaria, Milano, Angeli.
Caprettini, Gian Paolo (1996), La scatola parlante, Roma, Editori Riuniti.
Cattaneo, Ismaele/Forgione, Luca (2006), Osservatoria: analisi dei videoclip, in: Stefano Gensini (ed.), Fare comunicazione. Teoria ed esercizi, Roma, Carocci, 335–349.
Chiantera, Angela (1989), Una lingua in vendita: l’italiano della pubblicità, Roma, La Nuova Italia.
Codeluppi, Vanni (2000), Pubblicità, Bologna, Zanichelli.
Codeluppi, Vanni (2002), La sociologia dei consumi. Teorie classiche e prospettive contemporanee, Roma, Carocci.
Codeluppi, Vanni (2006), Che cos’è la pubblicità, Roma, Carocci.
Cortelazzo, Michele (1988), Lingua e mass-media, in: Günter Holtus/Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. IV: Italienisch, Korsisch, Sardisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 206–219.
Coveri, Lorenzo/Benucci, Antonella/Diadori, Pierangela (1998), Le varietà dell’italiano. Manuale di sociolinguistica italiana, Siena, Bonacci.
D’Achille, Paolo (2012), La lingua della televisione, in: Marcello Aprile (ed.), Lingua e linguaggi dei media, Roma, Aracne, 121–148.
Dardano, Maurizio (1973), Il linguaggio dei giornali italiani, Bari, Laterza.
Dardano, Maurizio (42002), La lingua dei media, in: Valerio Castronovo/Nicola Tranfaglia (edd.), La stampa italiana nell’età delle TV. Dagli anni Settanta a oggi, Bari, Laterza, 243–285.
De Mancini-Himmrich, Chiara (2006), Lingua italiana e pubblicità: testi pubblicitari come testi didattici, in: Elmar Schafroth (ed.), Lingua e mass-media in Italia: dati, analisi e suggerimenti didattici, Bonn, Romanistischer Verlag, 181–197.
De Mauro, Tullio (1963), Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Bari, Laterza.
Del Basso, Tiziana (2006), Osservatorio pubblicitario: gli strumenti retorici, in: Stefano Gensini (ed.), Fare comunicazione. Teoria ed esercizi, Roma, Carocci, 287–300.
Demarmels, Sacha (2008), Die Produktwerbung von Valserwasser – eine Globalisierungsgeschichte?, in: Gudrun Held/Sylvia Bendel (edd.), Werbung – grenzenlos, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang, 191–210.
Desideri, Paola (1996), Il riuso linguistico nella comunicazione pubblicitaria, in: Paola Desideri (ed.), La pubblicità tra lingua e icona, Ancona, Humana, 119–160.
Desideri, Paola/Sannazaro, Francesca (2012), La forza della parola pubblicitaria tra retorica, pragmatica e intertestualità, in: Marco Gargiulo (ed.), L’Italia e i mass media, Roma, Aracne, 325–360.
Diadori, Paola (1994), L’italiano televisivo: aspetti linguistici, extralinguistici, glottodidattica, Roma, Bonacci.
Diekmannshenke, Hajo/Klemm, Michael/Stöckl, Hartmut (edd.) (2011), Bildlinguistik. Theorien – Methoden – Fallbeispiele, Berlin, Schmidt.
Diodato, Filomena (2006), Format e palinsesti, in: Stefano Gensini (ed.), Fare comunicazione. Teoria ed esercizi, Roma, Carocci, 351–388.
Dittgen, Andrea Maria (1989), Regeln für Abweichungen. Funktionale sprachspielerische Abweichungen in Zeitungsüberschriften, Werbeschlagzeilen, Werbeslogans, Wandsprüchen und Titeln, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang.
Dusi, Nicola (2006), Le forme del trailer come manipolazione intrasemiotica, in: Isabella Pezzini (ed.), Trailer, Spot, Clip, Siti, Banner. Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva, Roma, Meltemi, 31–67.
Eco, Umberto (1972), Analisi semantica di un caso pubblicitario, Sipra 1, 19–24.
Ebert, Helmut (2000), Werbeanzeigen als duomediale Darstellungsformen und als duomediale Texte, in: Kirsten Adamzik (ed.), Textsorten. Reflexionen und Analysen, Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 215–222.
Gaede, Werner (1981), Vom Wort zum Bild. Kreativ-Methoden der Visualisierung, München, Langen-Müller-Herbig.
Gerstenberg, Annette (2006), Geschichte der Sprache der Werbung in der Romania/Histoire du langage publicitaire dans la Romania, in: Gerhard Ernst et al. (edd.), Romanische Sprachgeschichte/Histoire linguistique de la Romania, vol. II, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 2161–2175.
Giacomelli, Roberto (2004), La lingua della pubblicità, in: Ilaria Bonomi/Andrea Masini/Silvia Morgana (edd.), La lingua italiana e i mass media, Roma, Carocci, 223–248.
Gili, Guido (2012), I mutamenti della lingua della televisione: una prospettiva sociologica, in: Marcello Aprile (ed.), Lingua e linguaggi dei media, Roma, Aracne, 153–178.
Grignaffini, Giorgio (2004), I generi televisivi, Roma, Carocci.
Große, Franziska (2011), Bildlinguistik. Grundbegriffe und Methoden der linguistischen Bildanalyse in Text- und Diskursumgebungen, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang.
Grunig, Blanche (1990), Les mots de la publicité. L’architecture du slogan, Paris, Presses du CNRS.
Hausendorf, Heiko (2009), Kleine Texte – Über Randerscheinungen von Textualität, Germanistik in der Schweiz 6, <http://www.sagg-zeitschrift.unibe.ch/6_09/hausendorf.html> (08.12.2016).
Häusermann, Jürg (2005), Räume des Radios, in: Joachim Knape (ed.), Medienrhetorik, Tübingen, Attempto, 159–173.
Held, Gudrun (2007), Bedeutung zwischen Bild und Text – Bréals Polysemiekonzept im Spiegel der multimodalen Inszenierung von Werbetexten, in: Hans Giessen/Heinz-Helmut Lüger (edd.), Michel Bréal – Grenzüberschreitende Signaturen, Landau, Verlag Empirische Pädagogik, 231–261.
Held, Gudrun (2009a), Spazi, segni, sogni: l’annuncio di destinazione, testo multimodale nella comunicazione turistica, in: Francesca Santulli (ed.), Pragmatica della comunicazione turistica, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 221–285.
Held, Gudrun (2009b), Qui mi sento libero. Zu Formen der multimodalen Inszenierung von “Raum als Traum” in der Tourismuswerbung, in: Verena Dolle/Uta Helfrich (edd.), Zum “spatial turn” in der Romanistik, München, Meidenbauer, 143–163.
Held, Gudrun (2011), Il testo breve: condensazione multimodale nella comunicazione di massa. Riflessioni in chiave della linguistica dei media, in: Gudrun Held/Sabine Schwarze (edd.), Testi brevi. Teoria e pratica della testualità nell’era multimediale, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang, 31–51.
Held, Gudrun (2012), Kreativität am Kiosk – Pressetextsorten zwischen Theatralität und Anschaulichkeit, in: Christian Grösslinger/Gudrun Held/Hartmut Stöckl (edd.), Pressetextsorten jenseits der “News”, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang, 1–13.
Held, Gudrun/Schwarze, Sabine (edd.) (2011), Testi brevi. Teoria e pratica della testualità nell’era multimediale, Frankfurt am Main, Lang.
Helfrich, Uta (2006), Geschichte der Sprache von Hörfunk, Kino und Fernsehen in der Romania/Histoire des langages de la radio, du cinéma et de la télévision, in: Gerhard Ernst et al. (edd.), Romanische Sprachgeschichte/Histoire linguistique de la Romania, vol. II, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 2263–2278.
Hoffmann, Michael (2012), Werbekommunikation stilistisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 179–197.
Iannucci, Fulvio (1999), La comunicazione pubblicitaria, in: Stefano Gensini (ed.), Manuale della comunicazione: modelli semiotici, linguaggi, pratiche testuali, Roma, Carocci, 363–389.
Iannucci, Fulvio (2006), La comunicazione pubblicitaria, in: Stefano Gensini (ed.), Fare comunicazione. Teoria ed esercizi, Roma, Carocci, 255–287.
Janich, Nina (1999/2013), Werbesprache. Ein Arbeitsbuch, Tübingen, Narr.
Janich, Nina (ed.) (2012), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke.
Kloepfer, Rolf (1975), Poetik und Linguistik. Semiotische Instrumente, München, Fink.
Kloepfer, Rolf/Landbeck, Hanne (1991), Ästhetik der Werbung. Der Fernsehspot in Europa als Symptom neuer Macht, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer.
Koch, Peter/Oesterreicher, Wulf (1990), Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer.
Kress, Gunther/van Leeuwen, Theo (1996/2006), Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design, London/New York, Routledge.
Kress, Gunther/van Leeuwen, Theo (2001), Multimodal Discourse. The modes and media of contemporary communication, London, Routledge.
Lo Feudo, Giorgio (2012), Spot vs. recensione pubblicitaria. Una lettura semiotica di due tipologie testuali, in: Marco Gargiulo (ed.), L’Italia e i mass media, Roma, Aracne, 307–324.
Lombardi, Marco (ed.) (1998), Il nuovo manuale di tecniche pubblicitarie, Milano, Angeli.
Losi, Simonetta (2007), L’italiano trasmesso. Analisi e riflessi sulla lingua nazionale, Perugia, Guerra.
Ludwig, Hans Werner (2005), Wahrnehmungsmagnet Fernsehen, in: Joachim Knape (ed.), Medienrhetorik, Tübingen, Attempto, 173–195.
Lugrin, Gilles (2006), Généricité et intertextualité dans le discours publicitaire, Bern/Frankfurt am Main, Lang.
Magistretti, Stefano (1998), Retorica e pubblicità, in: Marco Lombardi (ed.), Il nuovo manuale di tecniche pubblicitarie, Milano, Angeli, 224–257.
Maingueneau, Dominique (2007), Analyser les textes de communication, Paris, Colin.
Manetti, Giovanni (2006), Specchio delle mie brame. Dodici anni di spot televisivi, Pisa, Edizioni ETS.
Maraschio, Nicoletta (1982), L’italiano del doppiaggio, in: Accademia della Crusca, L’italiano in movimento, Firenze, Accademia della Crusca, 135–158.
Maraschio, Nicoletta (1997), Una giornata radiofonica – osservazioni linguistiche, in: Accademia della Crusca (ed.), Gli italiani trasmessi. La radio, Firenze, Accademia della Crusca, 789–833.
Mauroni, Elisabetta/Piotti, Mario (edd.) (2010), L’italiano televisivo 1976–2006, Firenze, Accademia della Crusca.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London, Routledge.
Menduni, Enrico (2002), I linguaggi della radio e della televisione. Teorie e pratiche, Bari, Laterza.
Nacci, Laura (2003), La lingua della televisione, in: Ilaria Bonomi/Andrea Masini/Silvia Morgana (edd.), La lingua italiana e i mass media, Roma, Carocci, 67–92.
Nacci, Laura (2008), La lingua della televisione, in: Gabriella Alfieri/Ilaria Bonomi (edd.), Gli italiani del piccolo schermo. Lingua e stili comunicativi nei generi televisivi, Firenze, Cesati, 67–90.
Nencioni, Giovanni (1976), Parlato-parlato, parlato-scritto, parlato-recitato, Strumenti Critici 10, 1–56.
Nielsen, Martin (2012), Werbekommunikation kulturkontrastiv, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 305–320.
Nöth, Winfried (2000), Handbuch der Semiotik, Stuttgart/Weimar, Metzler.
Ong, Walter (1987), Oralität und Literalität. Die Technologisierung des Wortes, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag.
Osthus, Dietmar (2006), Massenkommunikation und Sprachgeschichte: Galloromania/Communication des masses et histoire des langues: Galloromania, in: Gerhard Ernst et al. (edd.), Romanische Sprachgeschichte/Histoire linguistique de la Romania, vol. II, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 1280–1292.
Packard, Vance (1961), The Hidden Persuaders, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Parlangèli, Oronzo (1971), La Nuova Questione della Lingua, Brescia, Paideia.
Perrin, Daniel (2006), Medienlinguistik, Konstanz, UVK.
Perugini, Marco (1994), La lingua della pubblicità, in: Luca Serianni/Pietro Trifone (edd.), Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 2: Scritto e parlato, Torino, Einaudi, 599–615.
Peverini, Paolo (2004), Il videoclip: strategie e figure di una forma breve, Roma, Meltemi.
Peverini, Paolo (2006), Il videoclip: un’analisi dei dispositivi enunciativi, in: Isabella Pezzini (ed.), Trailer, Spot, Clip, Siti, Banner. Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva, Roma, Meltemi, 67–110.
Pezzini, Isabella (ed.) (2006), Trailer, Spot, Clip, Siti, Banner. Le forme brevi della comunicazione audiovisiva, Roma, Meltemi.
Polesana, Maria Grazia (2003), Linguaggi/Generi della pubblicità, Milano, Arcipelago.
Postman, Neil (1985), Wir amüsieren uns zu Tode. Urteilsbildung im Zeitalter der Unterhaltungsindustrie, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer.
Prakke, Henk (1968), Kommunikation der Gesellschaft, Münster, Regensberg.
Raffaelli, Sergio (1992), La lingua filmata. Didascalie e dialoghi nel cinema italiano, Firenze, Le Lettere.
Raffaelli, Sergio (1994), Il parlato cinematografico e televisivo, in: Luca Serianni/Pietro Trifone (edd.), Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 2: Scritto e parlato, Torino, Einaudi, 271–290.
Reimann, Sandra (2008), Mehrmedialität in der werblichen Kommunikation. Synchrone und diachrone Untersuchungen von Werbestrategien, Tübingen, Narr.
Reimann, Sandra (2012), Zugänge zu Korpora deutscher Werbung, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 483–493.
Römer, Christine (2012), Werbekommunikation lexikologisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 33–48.
Roth, Kersten S./Spitzmüller, Jürgen (edd.) (2007), Textdesign und Textwirkung in der massenmedialen Kommunikation, Konstanz, UVK.
Runkehl, Jens (2012), Werbekommunikation medienlinguistisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 275–291.
Sabatini, Francesco (1982), La comunicazione orale, scritta e trasmessa: la diversità del mezzo, della lingua e delle funzioni, in: Educazione linguistica nella scuola superiore, Roma, Provincia di Roma CNR, 103–127.
Sabatini, Francesco (1997), Prove per l’italiano “trasmesso” (e auspici di un parlato serio semplice), in: Accademia della Crusca (ed.), Gli italiani trasmessi. La radio, Firenze, Accademia della Crusca, 11–30.
Schmitt, Christian (1990), Sprache und Gesetzgebung: Frankreich, in: Günter Holtus/Michael Metzeltin/Christian Schmitt (edd.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. V,1: Französisch, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 334–354.
Schmitz, Ulrich (1997), Schriftliche Texte in multimedialen Kontexten, in: Reinhard Weingarten (ed.), Sprachwandel durch Computer, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 131–159.
Schmitz, Ulrich (2003), Text-Bild-Metamorphosen in Medien um 2000, in: Ulrich Schmitz/Horst Wenzel (edd.), Wissen und neue Medien. Bilder und Zeichen von 800 bis 2000, Berlin, Schmidt, 241–263.
Schmitz, Ulrich (2004), Sprache in modernen Medien: Einführung in Tatsachen und Theorien, Themen und Thesen, Berlin, Schmidt.
Schmitz, Ulrich (2007), Sehlesen. Text-Bild-Gestalten in massenmedialer Kommunikation, in: Kersten S. Roth/Jürgen Spitzmüller (edd.), Textdesign und Textwirkung in der massenmedialen Kommunikation, Konstanz, UVK, 93–109.
Schüler, Dominic (2012), Werbekommunikation rhetorisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 197–212.
Semprini, Andrea (ed.) (1990), Lo sguardo semiotico. Pubblicità, stampa, radio, Milano, Angeli.
Semprini, Andrea (2003), Analizzare la comunicazione. Come analizzare la pubblicità, le immagini, i media, Milano, Angeli.
Sergio, Giuseppe (2004), Il linguaggio della pubblicità radiofonica, Roma, Aracne.
Serianni, Luca/Trifone, Pietro (edd.) (1994), Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 2: Scritto e parlato, Torino, Einaudi.
Siever, Torsten/Schlobinski, Peter/Runkehl, Jens (edd.) (2005), Websprache.net. Sprache und Kommunikation im Internet, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter.
Sorice, Michele (2002), Lo specchio magico. Linguaggi, generi, formati e pubblici della televisione italiana, Roma, Editori Riuniti.
Sowinski, Bernhard (1979), Werbeanzeigen und Werbesendungen, München, Oldenbourg.
Spang, Kurt (1987), Grundlagen der Literatur- und Werberhetorik, Kassel, Reichenberg.
Spina, Stefania (2000), Il Corpus di Italiano Televisivo (CIT), <http://www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de/SILFI2000/abstracts/papers/Spina_co031.html> (08.12.2016).
Spina, Stefania (2006), L’italiano della televisione, una varietà intermedia tra scritto e parlato. Il caso delle dislocazioni, in: Elmar Schafroth (ed.), Lingua e mass-media in Italia: dati, analisi e suggerimenti didattici, Bonn, Romanistischer Verlag, 153–179.
Stöckl, Hartmut (1997), Werbung in Wort und Bild. Textstil und Semiotik englischsprachiger Anzeigenwerbung, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang.
Stöckl, Hartmut (1998), Das Flackern und Zappeln im Netz. Semiotische und linguistische Aspekte des “Webvertising”, Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 29, 77–111.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2004a), Die Sprache im Bild – Das Bild in der Sprache. Zur Verknüpfung von Sprache und Bild im massenmedialen Text, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2004b), Werbekommunikation – Linguistische Analyse und Textoptimierung, in: Karlfried Knapp et al. (edd.), Angewandte Linguistik. Ein Lehrbuch, Tübingen/Basel, Francke, 233–254.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2006), Zeichen, Text und Sinn – Theorie und Praxis der multimodalen Textanalyse, in: Eva Martha Eckkrammer/Gudrun Held (edd.), Textsemiotik. Studien zu multimodalen Texten, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang, 11–37.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2007), Hörfunkwerbung – “Kino für das Ohr”. Medienspezifika, Kodeverknüpfungen und Textmuster einer vernachlässigten Werbeform, in: Kersten S. Roth/Jürgen Spitzmüller (edd.), Textdesign und Textwirkung in der massenmedialen Kommunikation, Konstanz, UVK, 177–202.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2011), Multimodale Werbekommunikation – Theorie und Praxis, Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 54, 5–32.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2012a), Medienlinguistik. Zu Status und Methodik eines (noch) emergenten Forschungsfeldes, in: Christian Grösslinger/Gudrun Held/Hartmut Stöckl (edd.), Pressetextsorten jenseits der “News”, Frankfurt am Main et al., Lang, 13–37.
Stöckl, Hartmut (2012b), Werbekommunikation semiotisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 243–263.
Testa, Annamaria (2000), La parola immaginata. Teoria, tecnica e pratica del lavoro dei copywriter, Milano, Feltrinelli.
Testa, Annamaria (2004), Le vie del senso, Roma, Carocci.
Thim-Mabrey, Christiane (2012), Werbekommunikation syntaktisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 107–123.
Treccani (n.d.), Spot, <http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/spot> (08.12.2016).
Van Leeuwen, Theo (2005), Introducing Social Semiotics, London, Routledge.
Volli, Ugo (2003), Semiotica della pubblicità, Bari, Laterza.
Wüest, Jakob (2001), La gerarchia degli atti linguistici nel testo, Studies in Communication Sciences 171, 195–129.
Wyss, Eva Maria (1998), Werbespot als Fernsehtext. Images, Mimikry und kulturelle Variation, Tübingen, Niemeyer.
Ziem, Alexander (2012), Werbekommunikation semantisch, in: Nina Janich (ed.), Handbuch Werbekommunikation. Sprachwissenschaftliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Tübingen, Francke, 65–89.
18.227.161.173