Abstract. This research extends the theories and ways of linguistic pragmatics (Austin, Grice, Searle, Sperber, and Wilson) into the analysis of visual advertising imagery. It stretches and revises the strategy pioneered in semiology/semiotics by Roland Barthes. Much of the literature I cite in this present essay, appeared only quickly before Barthes died but Barthes understood it or knew from it. He co-edited Communications 30 (1979), where both a French translation of Grice 1975 and the Sperber and Wilson article which I also make some use appeared. Elles relevant de cette partie de la semiologie, longtemps delaissee, qu’on appelle, a la suite des auteurs anglo-saxons, la pragmatique’ (Barthes and Berthet 1979, p.4).
I don’t believe that what I am doing in this paper is a rest with the type of work he pioneered, and that everyone working in the communication and mass media studies has learned and can continue steadily to learn. Anyone who reads this essay will routinelyaccomplish the identification, understanding and criticism of advertisements encountered while watching TV, listening to radio, sitting in the cinema, reading a magazine, walking past billboards, and so forth.
In this article I offer an analysis of some neglected conditions of possibility of this regular fulfillment. Specifically, they tend to disregard those conditions of probability which distinguish cases of speech or utterances (parole) and their comprehension from the, or a vocabulary (langue), to recall the Sausurrean difference (Saussure 1959; Barthes 1964b, Ch.
For any activity X which humans accomplish, Kantian questions of the form, …