Advertising is fundamentally persuasive in nature. It is an attempt to get you, the consumer, to act in some way that benefits whoever is doing the advertising. At times, advertising seeks to achieve an impact by appealing to your rational self-interest as a consumer in a direct and transparent way. Other times, it seeks to have an impact in less direct ways, using techniques whose effects may be difficult to consciously evaluate in real time as you absorb the ad's message. How do advertisers hook into your cognitive mechanisms in such a way as to make their message more noticeably, more memorable, and more effective at persuading you?

This course uses advertising as a backdrop for studying important aspects of how human communication works. You will learn some of the basic methods and findings from the scientific study of language as they apply to commonly-used advertising tools. The course will focus on using this knowledge to make intelligent observations about advertising that you encounter in daily life. Ultimately, your new expertise should enable you to more consciously evaluate the intended impact of certain advertising techniques. It should also provide you with some of the conceptual tools you need to evaluate the scientific soundness of laws and policies pertaining to advertising, and to design research projects to further study the cognitive effects of specific ingredients found in ads.

Here are some of the topics that we cover in this class:

1. Introduction and Background:
   Persuasive communication, choice, and consumer rationality
   Historical background
   
   
2. Advertising claims, truth, and literal meaning
   Evaluating literal meanings
   Looking beyond literal meanings: connotation, evaluative language, specificity & vagueness
   
   
3. More non-literal meanings: Implications
   Implied vs. asserted levels of meaning
   Communicative assumptions of relevance and cooperativeness
   Implications involving expressions of quantity and comparison
   
   
4. Presupposition
   "Everyone knows it" -- using language to signal common knowledge
   Presupposition and false memory
   
   
5. Speech Acts
   Communicative goals in context
   "We're not selling anything" -- Disguising the communicative functions of ads
   "Who says?" -- The importance of the communicative agent
   
   
6. Constraining advertising practices
   Evaluating current Federal Trade Commission criteria for deceptive advertising
   FTC guidelines for endorsements and testimonials
   
   
7. Human inference and memory
   Memory for linguistic form and meaning
   The importance of what is forgotten: exploiting properties of selective human memory
   
   
8. Association and memory
   Association networks and memory links
   What's in a name? Word associations involving meaning and sound.
   Brand names & trademark infringement
   
   
9. Attention
   Getting attention: incongruity, ambiguity and cognitive engagement
   Managing attention: selective emphasis and de-emphasis
   Tracking eye movements to study attention
   
   
10. Language variation and audience targeting
    Linguistic differences in dialect by geography, class, gender, register
    Marketing identities

Class assignments include a mix of quizzes, journal assignments, exams and a final project.