Words R Us

the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important

a rhetorical figure occurs when an expression deviates from expectation

With respect to metaphor, for instance, listeners are aware of conventions with respect to the use of words, one of which might be formulated as, words are generally used to convey one of the lead meanings given in their dictionary entry. A metaphor violates that convention, as in this headline for Johnson & Johnson bandaids, "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," accompanied by a picture of bandaids emblazoned with cartoon characters (from Table 2)

listeners know exactly what to do when a speaker violates a convention: they search for a context that will render the violation intelligible. If context permits an inference that the bandaid is particularly strong, or that the world inhabited by children is particularly threatening, then the consumer will achieve an understanding of the advertiser's statement.

every figure represents a gap. The figure both points to a translation (the impossibility in this context of translating "Say hello to your child's new petunias" is the key to its incomprehensibility), and denies the adequacy of that translation, thus encouraging further interpretation.

metaphors that have become frozen or conventional: e.g., the sports car that "hugs" the road.

an important function of rhetorical figures is to motivate the potential reader.

Berlyne (1971) found incongruity

(deviation) to be among those factors that call to and arrest attention.

"pleasure of the text"--the reward that comes from processing a clever arrangement of signs.

Berlyne's (1971) argument, based on his research in experimental aesthetics, that incongruity (deviation) can produce a pleasurable degree of arousal.

Familiar examples of schematic figures would include rhyme and alliteration, while metaphors and puns would be familiar examples of tropic figures.

Schemes can be understood as deviant combinations, as in the headline, "Now Stouffers makes a real fast real mean Lean Cuisine."

This headline is excessively regular because of its repetition of sounds and words. It violates the convention that sounds are generally irrelevant to the sense of an utterance, i.e., the expectation held by receivers that the distribution of sounds through an utterance will be essentially unordered except by the grammatical and semantic constraints required to make a well-formed sentence. Soundplay can be used to build up meaning in a wide variety of ways (Ross 1989; van Peer 1986).

Many tropes, particularly metaphors and puns effected in a single word, can be understood as deviant selections. Thus, in the Jergens skin care headline (Table 2), "Science you can touch," there is a figurative metaphor, because "touch" does not belong to the set of verbs which can take as their object an abstract collective endeavor such as Science.

For example, a rhyme forges extra phonemic links among the headline elements.

"Performax protects to the max," the consumer has several encoding possibilities available, including the propositional content, the phonemic equivalence (Performax = max), and the syllable node (other words endin

Because they are over-coded, schemes add internal redundancy to advertising messages. Repetition within a text can be expected to enhance recall just as repetition of the entire text does.

The memorability of tropes rests on a different mechanism. Because they are under-coded, tropes are incomplete in the sense of lacking closure. Tropes thus invite elaboration by the reader. For example, consider the Ford ad with the headline "Make fun of the road" (Table 2). "Road" is unexpected as a selection from the set of things to mock or belittle. Via

This level of the framework distinguishes simple from complex schemes and tropes to yield four rhetorical operations--repetition, reversal, substitution, destabilization.

s artful deviation, irregularity, and complexity that explain the effects of a headline such as "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," and not its assignment to the category 'metaphor.'

The rhetorical operation of repetition combines multiple instances of some element of the expression without changing the meaning of that element. In advertising we find repetition applied to sounds so as to create the figures of rhyme, chime, and alliteration or assonance (Table 2). Repetition applied to words creates the figures known as anaphora (beginning words), epistrophe (ending words), epanalepsis (beginning and ending) and anadiplosis (ending and beginning). Repetition applied to phrase structure yields the figure of parison, as in K Mart's tagline: "The price you want. The quality you need." A limiting condition is that repeated words not shift their meaning with each repetition (such a shift would create the trope known as antanaclasis, as shown further down in Table 2).

the possibility for a second kind of schematic figure, which would be produced via an operation that we have named reversal. Th

rhetorical operation of reversal combines within an expression elements that are mirror images of one another.

The rhetorical operation of destabilization selects an expression such that the initial context renders its meaning indeterminate. By "indeterminate" we mean that multiple co-existing meanings are made available, no one of which is the final word. Whereas in a trope of substitution, one says something other than what is meant, and relies on the recipient to make the necessary correction, in a trope of destabilization one means more than is said, and relies on the recipient to develop the implications. Tropes of substitution make a switch while tropes of destabilization unsettle.

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Grice, Herbert P. (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leigh, James H. (1994), "The Use of Figures of Speech in Print Ad Headlines," Journal of Advertising, 23(June), 17-34.

Mitchell, Andrew A. (1983), "Cognitive Processes Initiated by Exposure to Advertising," in Information Processing Research in Advertising, ed. Richard J. Harris, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 13-42.