BRAND NAMES AND ENGLISH PUNS IN ROMANIAN VIRTUAL ADVERTISING SPACE

Abstract

In order to explain these aspects, the analysis relies on theoretical principles taken from semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, psycholinguistics and literary theory. [...]some sociolinguistic factors and precepts are also invoked, especially with reference to the globalisation of advertising space. The two textual levels of puns indicate that the interpretation of this form of word play is realised in several successive stages, whose felicitous individual and overall development depends on the availability of the aforementioned types of knowledge. [...]psycholinguistically, the comprehension of puns is materialised in a process of decoding and recoding which is achieved in three reading phases: (1) a reading in the foreground of the utterance, prompted by all the components of the pun text, functioning as a system, and the general meaning of the utterance. The interpretative effort intensifies, due to the filtering activity performed in view of determining the "odd one out" in the pun text; (3) an articulating reading, aimed at connecting the previous phases of interpretation, at establishing a linguistic-affective relationship between the two textual dimensions. [...]while a parallel is drawn between the source text (the onymic unit) and the target text (the pun utterance), the attitude conveyed through the pun by its creator is grasped. In this example, the deonymisation does not hinder the correct identification of the product advertised, due to the fact that the brand name Impulse is, actually, graphically akin to the appellative impulse. [...]the meaning of the common noun is finely contextualised so as to suggest some of the positive qualities of the product: liveliness, vigour and sex appeal can be understood to be the attributes that one acquires by using this deodorant.

Headnote

Abstract: The paper analyses the use of brand names in print advertisements that are built on puns in English. It explores the architecture of pun utterances and the behaviour of onomastic items selected as pun bases, mainly within the frameworks of semantics, pragmatics, semiotics and psycholinguistics. The texts discussed are collected from virtual public space and illustrate the globalisation of Romanian advertising.

Keywords: advertisements, brand names, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, puns, semantics

1. Introduction

The present study examines the use of brand names as bases for English puns employed in print advertisements collected from the Romanian virtual environment. Taking into consideration a selection of advertising texts built in the manner of slogans, the paper analyses the use of brand names as markers (conveyors) of ambiguity-related word play, meant to obtain a primarily humorous and satirical effect. While highlighting the semantic shifts that proper names undergo as a result of their peculiar (nonprototypical) employment, the study sets to identify the linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms which underlie the aforementioned transformations. In order to explain these aspects, the analysis relies on theoretical principles taken from semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, psycholinguistics and literary theory. Moreover, some sociolinguistic factors and precepts are also invoked, especially with reference to the globalisation of advertising space. The trend of onomastic play analysed in this paper is widespread, but its conspicuousness tends to be peculiar to the English language, perhaps as an unsurprising effect of the still unquestionable status of English as a lingua franca. In this context, the occurrence of English onomastic puns in Romanian advertising space does not appear to be discordant. Nevertheless, to illustrate the extent of their use in Romanian, some examples will be provided in this language as well.

The texts that constitute the working material of this investigation were selected from the Romanian virtual space. They were created by Andrei (Deiu) Stanciu, a Romanian copywriter, as part of one of his collections of print advertisements, Brandom Humor, and can be accessed freely on his Facebook page (signed Deiu Stanciu) or on various specialised websites, such as Suburban Magazine (see Chirila 2014).

2. Advertising discourse and punning

In contemporary marketing communication, advertising discourse is a complex, multimodal composition (see Cmeciu 2010: 34 and Sjöblom 2008: 351), usually designed as a paratextual (cf. Genette 2001: 1-2) extension of the brand identity (Corbu 2009: 64) of a product, business (establishment) or institution. The main function of an advertisement is to convey a specific message, which consists of several positive associations related to the object advertised and which the sender (the individual or group behind the commercialised object) wishes the receiver (the target audience of the ad) to grasp, believe and accept (Alrasheedi 2014: 71). Put differently, the aim of most advertisements is commercial, i.e. to persuade prospective customers of the benefits that are sure to be derived from coming into contact with a certain product, business or institution.

Sometimes, in order to transmit information, the persuasive rhetorical devices used in advertisements rely to a great extent on humour and irony (even sarcasm). In these instances, ambiguity, polarity (positive or negative semantic oppositions) and unexpectedness ("contextual imbalances among the semantic meanings of the words") (Reyes, Rosso and Buscaldi 2012: 5) are often employed/sought (either together or independently) as pragmatic stimuli. As such, when decoded properly, these features may facilitate the production of a precise, desired response on the part of potential customers. This behaviour is elicited by means of the advertising utterance not through the advertising text per se, but essentially through how this text is built (Abass 2007: 48).

A way of devising pragmatically efficient advertising texts consists of punning, by which one understands, in agreement with Partington (2009: 1794), "the bisociative play between two sound sequences", a play on words, as well as on ideas. Puns are frequent occurrences in advertisements, often - but not necessarily - as a part of humorous language (Crawford and Gregory 2015: 571). Like other kinds of word games, puns are illustrative of the "ludic uses of language, where the aim is not primarily to communicate meaning but to draw attention to the way the normal rules of language can be bent or broken to convey novel effects" (Crystal 2007: 464, italics in the original). Usually, semantic consistency and singular discursive cohesion are affected first and foremost through punning. By associating a single phonetic form (as regards exact puns) or two very similar such forms (as regards near puns) (see Partington 2009: 1796) with two distinct meanings, manner maxims are flouted and ambiguity is deliberately generated (Grice 2004: 49; Taylor and Taylor 1990: 30). Through a pun, what initially might have appeared as the suitable, salient direction of interpretation in communication is cut short, and a different, antipodal interpretation is brought to the fore (Grice 2004: 55). Naturally, this semantic mutability does not threaten the security of the cooperative principle as a whole. As long as the meaning deviation is perceived and acknowledged by the receivers (or at least expected, foreseen), the pun will have fulfilled its purpose and the intended message will have reached its destination successfully.

3. Onomastics at play

Proper names are types of words that punsters have always been keen to exploit, due to the ease with which these constructions are fixed on the level of an established linguistic and cultural convention (van Langendonck 2007: 6), and sometimes even beyond that. Names have a primary identifying function and whatever meanings one may distinguish upon their use are basically associative senses, not asserted lexical ones (van Langendonck 2007: 7). Nevertheless, in specific circumstances, names may be provided various emotive, functional and categorial meanings, as a result of their use. It is precisely due to this characteristic of ad-hoc semanticisation that proper names make up felicitous punning material.

Whether humorous or nonhumorous, name-based puns are, as all such instances of word play, deeply contextualised constructions. Knowledge of the language in which a pun is coined determines speakers' understanding of the ludic speech act and creates the context that is favourable for the identification of the attitudinal gist that a pun may convey, like amusement, irony, sarcasm and seriousness, etc. In the case of puns that deviate from standard language and rely on the use of dialect or slang to generate humour, one's familiarisation with the linguistic code is crucial for their correct interpretation. However, in the case of onomastic puns, especially those based on names of brands or well-known figures, relevant encyclopaedic knowledge must be owned and accessed to be able to correlate the onomastic decoding of the material on which the pun is built and its non-onomastic reorientation. Therefore, from this pragmatic-discursive viewpoint, onomastic puns (and all puns by extension) take the shape of two-dimensional utterances designed as palimpsests. The pun basis includes two semantic layers of text:

(1) one retrievable at sentence (macro) level and well integrated in it (the phonetic unity of the name form is broken into as many parts as necessary to "glue" the matrix text), and

(2) one retrievable at the name form (micro) level, conveying various emotive and sociocultural associations, influenced by the importance of the original denotatum, the aspects that are meant to be highlighted, and the attitude of the pun makers (as well as of the receivers of the pun) towards the name bearer.

The two textual levels of puns indicate that the interpretation of this form of word play is realised in several successive stages, whose felicitous individual and overall development depends on the availability of the aforementioned types of knowledge. Thus, psycholinguistically, the comprehension of puns is materialised in a process of decoding and recoding which is achieved in three reading phases:

(1) a reading in the foreground of the utterance, prompted by all the components of the pun text, functioning as a system, and the general meaning of the utterance. The interpretative effort made at this stage is mild, as this is the phase in which language users get acquainted with the pun;

(2) a reading in the background of the utterance, focusing on identifying, from the entire textual concoction, the onymic item on which the pun is based. The interpretative effort intensifies, due to the filtering activity performed in view of determining the "odd one out" in the pun text;

(3) an articulating reading, aimed at connecting the previous phases of interpretation, at establishing a linguistic-affective relationship between the two textual dimensions. Thus, while a parallel is drawn between the source text (the onymic unit) and the target text (the pun utterance), the attitude conveyed through the pun by its creator is grasped. Both the context and co-text will help elucidate whether the pun is serious, humorous, ironic, sarcastic, critical or a combination of the above.

An instance of pun seriousness lies in the Latin biblical verse "et ego dico tibi quia tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam" (BibleGateway.com, Matthaeus 16: 18) and its French translation: "Et moi, je te dis que tu es Pierre, et que sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon Église" (Matthieu 16: 18). In English, the adaptation of the verse fails to preserve the pun on the proper name Peter (the English equivalent of Latin Petrus and French Pierre): "And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church" (Matthew 16: 18).

While no humour is intended in the afore-quoted context, in advertisements some degree of light-heartedness is often implied, because puns in commercial discourse are "a feature of the linguistic context of trade names" (Crystal 1994: 63): e.g., British Steel: British mettle, Chexellent, or what? (Frosted Chex breakfast cereals), It 'asda be Asda (slogan for Asda supermarket chain), You just can't help acting on Impulse (for Impulse deodorant), You'll find there is no Camparison (Campari aperitif), and others (Foster 2007). As these examples show, the puns are employed in slogans or slogan-like advertising texts. In the process of punning, the proper noun is deonymised, i.e., it loses its proprial status. To be more explicit, the onymic quality/function of the proper name ceases to be the primary direction of interpretation in the context of a given advertising speech act and, instead, one is suggested a different, descriptive, logically predicative reading. The latter is mediated by a phonetic form that is identical or quasi-identical to the one that the context a priori established as defining, signifying the proper name. When one hears or sees an advertisement about Impulse deodorant, for instance, one expects the advertising text to include the phonetic structure corresponding to the product name in relation to that name, not an appellative. In this example, the deonymisation does not hinder the correct identification of the product advertised, due to the fact that the brand name Impulse is, actually, graphically akin to the appellative impulse. Moreover, the meaning of the common noun is finely contextualised so as to suggest some of the positive qualities of the product: liveliness, vigour and sex appeal can be understood to be the attributes that one acquires by using this deodorant.

The message is not so easily decodable in all the onomastic puns of advertising texts, especially if they are designed as mock advertisements. In Andrei Stanciu's print advertisements, international and national brand names are used as bases for puns in English and Romanian. Frequently, the phonetic forms of these proper names are not the standard ones, of the source language (i.e., the language in which they were coined), but they are adapted to make up (quasi-)homophonous pairs and thereby create "semantic jokes", as Chirila (2014) calls them; in this way, companies try "to get integrated into people's lives" and to hide "their desire to sabotage competition" ["încercarile companiilor de a se integra în vie^ile oamenilor, precum si dorin^ele ascunse ale acestora de a-si sabota concuren^a"]. At the same time, such adverts implicitly ridicule the audience's reaction to these aggressive marketing strategies, the readiness with which individuals accept to be globalised and adopt consumerism as a way of life.

Of Andrei Stanciu's Brandom Humor collection of print advertisements, those that develop English-oriented homophonous pairs are based on brand names from several fields (listed below in descending order of brand-name occurrences).

(1) Technology and transportation industry: She is a VIRGIN, so UBISOFT ('She is a virgin, so you be soft'), Take a SEAT and let's find something you can afFORD ('Take a seat and let's find something you can afford'; phonetic exactness is disregarded in the case of the proper name SEAT ['seat] vs appellative seat ['si: t], as the pronunciation of the Spanish brand name is anglicised in order to obtain a meaningful utterance in the target language), Went to Romania with a KIA, came back with NOKIA ('Went in Romania with a Kia [car], came back with no Kia [car]'. The second brand name is well known in the mobile phone industry: Kia - Nokia puns are frequent in mock advertisements, usually created by anonymous punsters to entertain fellow Internet surfers); WIFIght? ('Why fight?'); YAMAHArt, you're my soul ('You're my heart, you're my soul', inspired by the title and homonymous chorus line of a famous dance-pop song by Modern Talking); You know, for a PIONEER you're not that SHARP ('You know, for a pioneer you're not that sharp');

(2) Drinking and smoking: AMSTEL in love with STELLA ARTOIS ('I'm still in love with Stel(l)a, are tois?', combining English and French and sacrificing grammatical accuracy for the sake of phonetic and semantic appropriateness - Stella Artois is a Belgian beer brand); I KENT seem to get DAVIDOFF the bong ('I can't seem to get David off the bong'); So many sexy BECK'S, this must be a HOEGAARDEN ('So many sexy backs, this must be a hoe garden'); The MORE Virginia smokes, the more VIRGINIA SLIMS ('The more Virginia smokes, the more Virginia slims');

(3) Cosmetic industry: That can't be JOHNSON'S BABY. Look at his HEAD & SHOULDERS ('That can't be Johnson's baby. Look at his head and shoulders').

In all the examples above, instead of the brand names, Andrei Stanciu uses the logos of the brands, which comprise alphabetic and non-alphabetic elements. This strategy helps one identify the referents of the constructions on which the puns are built and is, therefore, paramount in relation to brand names that can be mistaken, in decontextualized utterances and in the absence of visual cues, with semantically transparent nonproprial structures. For instance, one could construe the brand names Pioneer and Sharp in a similar manner, if one were able to only hear the text ('You know, for a pioneer you're not that sharp'), without seeing the logos of the two brands. A similar situation can be found in the case of the cigarette brand names More and Virginia Slims in the advertising message that reads as follows: 'The more Virginia smokes, the more Virginia slims'. On the one hand, the multimodal text facilitates the development of an iconic and even indexical function of names (Smith 2006: 19), apart from the symbolic function that they had already been fulfilling. On the other, it seems to suggest that just as brands have become an integral part of our day-to-day lives, brand names are gradually easier to "spot" in our day-to-day language.

Andrei Stanciu illustrates the intrusion of brands into people's everyday life in contemporary Romanian public space, in contrast to the commercially monochromatic environment in pre-revolutionary Romania, through a significant number of print advertisements based on puns in Romanian. To indicate the extent of this effect, Stanciu frequently resorts to mock dialectal speech: Ajunsei acasa, o bruSKYPE nevasta, fu o zi frumoasa ('I got home, bullied my wife, it was a beautiful day'; bruSKYPE < Romanian bruscai, verb, a form of the past tense ('perfect simplu'), mocking the recurring use of this tense in the language variety spoken in the region of Oltenia, Romania, + the preposition pe ('on'), which here marks the accusative case of the noun that follows. For a boost of playfulness, rhyming may be involved: VICHY pleci din via^a mea, FA, ma doare inima ('In my life you come and go, girl, my heart is hurting so' - Vichy < Romanian vii '[you] come', verb, present tense, second-person singular form + the coordinating conjunction ^i 'and'; Fa < Romanian fa/fa, an interjection used in colloquial language to address female individuals). At the same time, mock ethnic speech may also be found: CiorDELLes (perhaps from Romanian ciordeala 'the act of stealing', a noun of Roma origin, derived from the verb cior 'to steal petty things'). The youth's increasing addiction to computers (technology in general) is suggested by means of puns that mock slang: Dau HP verde ('I'll give hash for the green'; HP < Romanian appellative ha^[i^] 'hash(ish)' + the preposition pe 'on, for'). The traits suggested by these puns refer to negative features related to the community targeted by means of the choice of a specific linguistic code. They are not representative of the social groups in question, but are stereotypically established in the Romanian mentality in relation to specific individuals belonging to these communities.

4. Conclusion

As when one decodes humour, the language users' responses to puns in the advertising texts illustrated "depend on an array of factors, including demographics, psychographics, culture, and behavioral variables (e.g., brand familiarity)" (Crawford and Gregory 2015: 570). In other words, the three-step interpretation algorithm described under section three of this paper is influenced by numerous linguistic and nonlinguistic factors.

Knowledge of a language or language variety is of the utmost necessity for understanding texts such as those analysed above, particularly when they mean to poke fun at dialects, slang or languages of ethnic minorities. In these instances, not being able to recognise the language code duplicated would result either in a tardy interpretation of the pun or in misconstrual. However, linguistic awareness does not guarantee one's apprehension of the attitudinal message conveyed by the advertising texts. Ignorance of the brands invoked in the printed advertisements may prevent one from grasping in what way the text read is humorous, ironic or critical of a social situation. At the same time, it is fair to underline the importance of the multimodality of these discourse samples, as the use of brand logos facilitates the identification of the onomastic items, i.e., the pun bases, thereby contributing significantly to the reduction of the interpretation effort. In agreement with Taylor and Taylor (1990: 69), one can but reemphasise the importance of the linguistic and situational context of an utterance, as it "aids discourse processing by narrowing the domain of interpretation, thus activating an appropriate knowledge structure".

By using proper names as triggers for puns, the samples of multimodal advertising discourse analysed prove to be 'anchored in the utterance situation', 'linked to the reader's encyclopaedic knowledge and recorded in a specific historical context' ["ancorate în situa^ia de enun^are", "legate de cunostin^ele enciclopedice ale cititorului si înscrise într-un context istoric particular"] (Maingueneau 2007: 207-208). In these advertisements, which criticise mass consumption by satirising contemporary society, proper names are resemiotised (Cmeciu 2010: 35) and the lexemes they contain are resemanticised, based on the phonetic forms that they are revealed to share (completely or partially) with other lexemes. Therefore, the behaviour of names in onomastic puns is twofold, straightforward and nonstraightforward (cf. Grice 2004: 55), depending on the way in which the advertising text is approached. When read aloud, the nonproprial interpretation is foregrounded, whereas if merely seen, the onymic decoding is prevalent, thanks to the visual cues (the logos or colour schemes) that guide the receivers' diagnosis of the communication situation. It is in this context that one may consider a proper name used in advertising puns "a threshold (...). Indeed, this fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public" (Genette 2001: 2). In other words, cross- culturally, cross-linguistically and cross-disciplinarily, in onomastic-based puns the proper name is a paratext.

References

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