Floating Maxims of Conversations in Commercials
Floating Maxims of Conversations in Commercials

Summary/Abstract: Many times while driving long distances you tend to get bored of the silence and turn on the radio to for some entertainment and run across a really catchy advertisement with a catchy slogan which even after many hours, you cannot force out of your head as it keeps playing and replaying inside. You have this sudden urge to sing those lines aloud, which you end up doing so after you fail to throw it out of your mind. Famous slogans are intended to make you listen, sign and remember the company as a part of their marketing campaign but what part do these slogans actually play in increasing the rate of success of their advertisement? Communication in society happens chiefly by means of language. However, the users of language, as social beings, communicate and use language on society's premises; society controls their access to the linguistic and communicative means. Pragmatics, as the study of the way humans use their language in communication, bases itself on a study of those premises and determines how they affect, and effectualize, human language use. Unfortunately, the definitions that have been offered do not delimit pragmatics either clearly and neatly, or to everybody's satisfaction. Many authors confine themselves to a strictly linguistically oriented definition; alternatively, they resort to a definition that, while incorporating as much societal context as possible, necessarily remains vague as regards the relation between pragmatics and the other areas of linguistics (even leaving aside the problem of these areas' autonomy vis-i-vis linguistics proper). The present paper deals with the way the maxims of conversation are flouted in commercials.

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