Parallelism: non-literary examples
Our answer for task C - 'Opposite meaning'
"Naughty but Nice"
In this slogan there is parallelism at more than one linguistic level.
There is grammatical parallelism because the coordination involves two
one-word adjectives. There is phonological parallelism because of the
word-initial alliteration between 'naughty' and 'nice'. And there is
graphological parallelism because of the initial capitalisation of the
initial 'n' for each word.
Notice how this parallelism and the 'opposite' coordinating conjunction
'but' lead us to assume that the two adjectives are antonyms (opposites).
But if you look them up in a dictionary you will see that they are not
normally antonyms in English. It is the parallelism that is helping
to rearrange our lexicons for us as we read this slogan.
What we have noticed so far about this ad helps us to show how the cream
producers in the UK softened the idea that cream is bad for you (fat,
cholesterol, associations with heart failure etc). 'Naughty' is a good
lexical choice with respect to this aim because although its connotations
are negative, they are nothing like so negative as 'nasty' or 'bad for
you'. Note also that the sequencing of the adjectives also plays a role.
'Nice but naughty' would be nothing like so effective. Persuasively it
is important to counter the unfortunate associations first, and then end
on the positive.
You will have noticed that on the non-literary deviation page we looked
again at some advertising slogans we had discussed in Topic One. A number
of things we looked at there could be better described via the concept
of deviation (and so foregrounding too). Notice that the examples we looked
at in the first session will also involve foregrounding effects through
parallelism. If you have time, you might like to look back through those
pages now that you have begun to learn about parallelism, to see how important
parallelism is in the examples we were using to discuss the effects of
different linguistic choices.
If you want to read more about the language of advertising, the following
books are helpful.
A. Goddard (1998) The Language of Advertising (Routledge)
G. N. Leech (1966) English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of
Advertising in Great Britain (Longman)
G. Myers (1994) Words in Ads (Arnold)
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