Nonsense in Advertising

Advertising is well-known for its crafted use of linguistic and rhetorical devices to shock and entertain the public: eye-catching graphic, lexical and syntactic anomalies combine with the playful subversion of the style and conventions of promotional discourse. This playing with words, texts, and contexts motivated by persuasive aims has been likened to the play-protest of nonsense illustrated by Lear’s and Carroll’s provocative text worlds. The two-fold nature of nonsense in adverts has been interpreted, on the one hand, as beneficial deviation spicing up a closely codified discourse and, on the other, as irksome gibberish exploiting the trite formulas of advertising diction. The discussion of the ad deviations is enhanced by a series of adtivities on advertising language in use testing the readers’ linguistic and discursive competences.