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Conversational Games of Advertising: A discussion from the perspective of Grice's maxims

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Author

  • Khatia Chikhladze

Summary, in English

This essay explores the employment of Grice’s maxims and conversational implicature in commercial advertising. Advertisers tend to flout Grice’s maxims to make a greater impact on customers. The interesting thing is that, as my analysis has shown, certain flouted maxims tend to co-occur. Moreover, flouting of the conversational maxims does not necessarily augment the impact. In fact, undue flouting of Grice’s maxims may cause a backlash, and either make the advertisement ineffective and a turnoff, or even damage the advertiser’s reputation. Hence, apart from identifying the patterns in which Grice’s maxims co-occur, my goal in this essay was to identify to what extent it is optimal to flout the conversational maxims, and which maxims play a more crucial role in making an advertisement ineffective. The analysis showed both more frequently occurring patterns and flouted maxims that can affect the effectiveness of an advertisement.

Department/s

Publishing year

2017

Language

English

Document type

Student publication for Bachelor's degree

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures

Keywords

  • advertisement
  • logic
  • pragmatics
  • Grice
  • flout
  • maxim
  • conversation
  • implicature
  • inference.

Supervisor

  • Eva Klingvall