This study sought to investigate and to record any recurring patterns in the form and communicative impact of Shona advertisements. Motivation to carry out the study came from a realisation of a growing interest in using the Shona language for advertising and the fact that very few studies have been done on Shona advertisements. For methodology, examples of Shona advertisements were qualitatively analysed using some communications and discourse analysis approaches of the speech act theory and text linguistics. A structured interview with advertising agencies randomly selected and a questionnaire on the impact of advertisements were also used. The findings of the research included that Shona was used in advertisements in order to reach out to the majority of the Zimbabwean population. In addition, Shona was also found to have been developed enough to handle formal issues like advertisements. This finding further shows that Shona advertisements reflect an instance of diglossia leakage from Shona L(ow) to Shona H(igh). Another finding is that Shona advertisements reflect some characteristics of the Shona speech community in form. These include code-switching, slang and word- division problems. An innovation in code-switching noted in some Shona advertisements is the use of three languages, namely, English, Shona and Ndebele in one advertisement. It was also established that everything about the elements of Shona advertisements communicate. For instance, the message may be visual, tactile and olfactory. It also emerged that the Shona commercial advertisements had a presenting and a hidden agenda at the same time. To achieve this the advertisements used persuasive techniques such as advertising claims, cultural hooks and personalities as spokespersons. It was also noted that most readers of advertisements do not interpret them up to the hidden persuaders but end with the direct meaning. On the other hand the Shona advertisements that gave information such as health issues have no hidden agenda. One recommendation made is that advertisements be read and studied to raise the level of awareness about the persuasive techniques used in order to distinguish between misleading advertising and those that give useful information. Some recommendations were made for future research such as carrying out similar studies of informal Shona advertisements, advertisements by n'angas/inyangas (traditional healers), prophets and political campaigns. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

曾幾何時，廣告在流行文化中已跳脫直接而露骨的銷售意圖，不論是電視廣告的表現形式，抑或報章雜誌的平面廣告，都歷經相當之變革。除了多姿多彩的圖像，更操弄了豐富的語言策略，甚且如詩一般的語言，融入文學新意，產生前所未有的廣告文學性。針對這樣的趨勢變遷，本文旨在透過以社會語用及批判性取徑（a sociopragmatic and critical approach）為主的言談分析（discourse analysis），為廣告文化在作者（／說者）和讀者（／聽者）間的溝通所扮演的角色提供一質性研究。嘗試從語言使用（language use）的層面來觀察：如何喚起群體意識？哪些是常用的語言策略？使用這些語言策略／修辭手段能給讀者帶來什麼樣的效應？這些語言使用伴隨著什麼樣的社會意義？分析架構植基於「攸關性理論」（Relevance Theory, Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995)，從讀者花費處理訊息的精力（processing efforts）審視其所能獲致的效果（contextual effects）。在另一方面，如同Sperber & Wilson（1995: 279）對於往後研究的期許，本研究更在語用分析中加入了社會文化認知和情境的考量，此正亦批判語言學家們的主要關切（Fairclough, 1995）。 分析語料取材自誠品書店所發表的系列廣告文案，係著眼於下列幾個明顯的現象：（一）文中採取豐富嶄新的語言策略，包括了隱喻、姓名／名稱的平行、重複與敘事，這些修辭手段常更能喚起讀者的注意和興趣，產生詩歌性（poetic effects）等認知效果，並表現各樣的語用／溝通功能。（二）大量西方文明裡的名字／名稱巧妙而生動地運用在這些廣告裡，涵蓋人名（藝術家／作家／詩人／名人）、地名、文學藝術名作和知名品牌。（三）對於作者而言，他們可以蘊含更多的情感、態度、情緒和感覺於其中，產生溝通裡的的弱式效果（weaker effects of communication, Wilson & Sperber, 1992），也能規避一些較為嚴肅的社會責任；而就讀者來說，這些語言策略得以預留更寬闊的詮釋空間，更吸引讀者。（四）除了使用這些語言策略來表現文學性，作者並藉由與讀者間的認知環境，利用流行話題與生活經驗，傳達了知識建構、同儕情誼、精英主義、女性意識、人文關懷、都會城市中產階級的生活型態，展現流行文化中的多元文化交融以及外語的強勢霸權地位，反映了傳統的／已改變的／變遷中的文化價值觀，邀請讀者認可這些顯著的意識型態與跨文化價值觀，進而形塑文化多元的認同和社會認知，呼應言談與社會／文化間的雙向關係（dialectical relationship, Fairclough, 1995）。誠品書店一再發表的系列文宣，雖然無法同電視廣告般在日常生活中與讀者（／聽者）的密集式接觸，然卻能在充裕的版面裡，在微觀層次上運用更多的語言策略，也能在宏觀的社會文化認知層次上，透過對流行文化形式與功能的檢視，有助提升其企業形象以臻一文化地標，對於諸如：刻板印象、權力象徵（symbolic power）、社會趨勢與變遷、文化標記（cultural iconicity）與認同、性別角色等討論，提供反思的空間。並對相關議題如「什麼構成了、什麼排除自、以及什麼包含於流行文化之中？」、「是否存在著流行文化記憶？」提供有用的觀察。 / This study aims to propose a pragmatic study along with a critical analysis of the print advertisements of Eslite Bookstore in Taiwan. It explores the audience’s comprehension and interpretation regarding emotions, poetic effects, and storytelling in media communication under relevance–theoretic account (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995; Noveck & Sperber, 2006) by looking into contemporary Chinese print ads released by Eslite. Since poetic effects and storytelling in long texts suitably illustrate the reasoning and pragmatic inference towards emotions via larger units of text processing and inferred implicit meanings, the current study centres on the audience’s inferential processes and pragmatic interpretations over longer texts against institutional discourse, advertising. The audience searches for optimal relevance in the interpretation process, during which a wide array of weak implicatures, based on her greater share of responsibility, could be inferred and derived from the non-literal speech together with the context, depending on the different degrees of involvement and shared cognitive environment. The sociocultural aspect of language use, on the other hand, is further explored to see the inseparable relationship between language and social function. The rhetorical strategies of syntactic parallelism and repetition of name, metaphor, and storytelling are artfully crafted through literary styles within the ads to attract the audience’s attention, to initiate cognitive poetic effects and advertising literariness, and to perform diverse pragmatic/communicative functions. They convey too the dominant ideologies, viz. intellectualism, elitism, social critique of taste, friends’ rapport, feminine awakening, humanistic concern, and the current lifestyles of petit bourgeoisie in urban contexts. The chosen data vastly adopt elegant wordings and stylistic patterns from names of person (artist/writer/poet/celebrity), place, literature, fashion and brand names to deliver aesthetic value. Placing little emphasis on target commodity, they invite and encourage an imaginative audience to actively and cognitively consume the texts and stories, and spell out a variety of weak implicatures involving feelings, attitudes, emotions and impressions along the textual lines. They invisibly persuade her to recognise the significant inter–/cultural values. Positioning the audience as social elite, shaping and branding the corporate image as a cultural polysemy and landmark of cultural empowerment, they also initiate an emergent text genre with communicative innovation in cultural industry and academic disciplines. People in all languages often mean more than they say. Grammar on its own is typically insufficient for determining the full meaning of an utterance, the assumption that the discourse is coherent or ‘makes sense’ has a vital role to play in meaning construction as well. Just as syntactic surface structures display complexity of underlying structures, we can appreciate much the implicit meanings constructed, conveyed and enriched by storytelling and the poetic force of lexical items and syntactic–semantic–pragmatic interplay in media discourse, as shown in the study. This functional linguistic study reveals that the selling motive could well be melted and/or hidden through those communication strategies due to their implicitness, indirectness and vagueness, and clarifies the simplistic dichotomy between Eastern vs. Western cultures. The dialogic relations between form and function in advertising language reflect the social cohesion/interaction and cognitive dynamics of communicator and audience, thus maintaining the dialectical relationship between social structures and social practice (Fairclough, 1995).