2.1Research approaches to advertising

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

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.

2.2The language of advertising as a subject of linguistic research

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?

2.3Listing up the most important linguistic cues of advertising language

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

3.1Media situation and social context

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.

3.2Media-specific remarks on the linguaggio of the audiovisual forms of advertising

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.