Levels of language & advertising slogans
Task D - Our answer
One clear thing which makes this advertisement memorable is its use
of sound and graphological patterning (note how poetry is easier to
learn by heart than prose as a consequence of its use of rhyme, alliteration
and assonance patterns). The first two words and the following two words
alliterate (sound patterning) and this is reinforced graphologically
not just because the spelling shapes also 'eye alliterate' but because
of the deviant use of initial capitals for each word.
If we look at the grammar, we can see that the graphological and sound
patterns are themselves linked to grammatical patterns. The whole slogan
is a noun phrase with the noun 'Buttermunch' as its head word (a noun
phrase is a phrase with a noun as its most important, or head word,
with the other words or phrases acting in a modifying relationship to
that head word). The two pairs of alliterating words ('Blissfully Buttery'
and 'Mightily Munchy') act together grammatically as adjective-head
phrases (with adverbs modifying the adjective head words) both modifying
the head noun 'Buttermunch'.
Hence the overall noun phrase has the following structure:
Finally, the complex of sound, graphological and grammatical patterns
is connected to a pattern of lexical repetition, whereby the first morphemes
in 'Buttery' and 'Munchy' are combined together to create the new word
'Buttermunch', which is both the brand name and an invented word, and
so a lexical oddity. To cap it all, there is a final graphological oddity
in that the word 'Buttermunch' is shown in the original advertisement
as the brand name on the sweet wrapper itself. It is not surprising, then,
that this advertisement is highly memorable, which is obviously useful
for the advertisers and product producers.
In our next section of this session, we re-visit the
issue of Intertextuality.
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