New Books In Language

We’ve never been in a more crowded marketplace, with more corporations shouting for our attention and custom. Yet this choice is an illusion, as detailed in Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You (Wiley, 2011). Using a battery of techniques, advertisers push us into recognising and ultimately choosing their brand. But forget crude commands to buy buy buy; advertisers are using sophisticated approaches which work with, not against, our cognitive abilities of memory, attention and language. Here is a book where the corporate and academic worlds meet head on. Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both serious researchers in the cognitive and language sciences, exemplify and analyse the ways in which advertisers and political candidates target their market. Familiar techniques of branding and personalisation exploit linguistic features such as presupposition, implicature, metaphor, audience design, speech acts, sociolinguistic variation, and syntactic framing. But can an awareness o