Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones
Abstract
Advertisements are so
ubiquitous nowadays that capturing the
addressee’s attention and maintaining it
long enough for them to be fully
processed have become fundamental
objectives for advertisers. Employing
specific strategies in the design of the
advertisement contributes efficiently to
achieving these goals, getting the
audience not only to attend the
stimulus but also to process it in certain
ways favourable for the advertiser. We
argue that Relevance theory, an
approach to communication built on a
massively modular view of cognition,
offers the right tools to explain the
nature of the interpretative processes
in verbal comprehension. Knowledge of
the relevance-based reflexive
inferential procedures involved in
utterance interpretation allows
advertisers to foresee the addressee’s
processing behaviour, giving them the
possibility to control it in a such a way
that the intended interpretative effects
are achieved in the desired way