The essence of advertising lies very often in unusual and surprising juxtapositions of apparently incongruous elements, which nevertheless successfully combine in producing a coherent and understandable message. A vital role is performed by a skillfully engineered context, which allows for simultaneous activation of certain otherwise inconspicuous senses and the construction of novel and attractive connections. Such theoretical proposals as Lemke’s traversals (2001; 2005), Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (1998; 2002) and Kecskes’s Dynamic Model of Meaning (2008) seem to describe many vital aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is in advertising that we often come across the linking of elements by transgressing naturally existing borders between domains which are unrelated, and we are invited to map onto one another different mental spaces on the basis of their salient analogy or identity, and indulge in creative riddle-like exploration of contextual elements in order to reconstruct the intended message. These techniques’ true power lies in their ability to blur the distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’ to such an extent that certain irrational but attractive connections, implanted in the minds of the audience, contribute to subsequent decisions in the real world. The present study attempts to uncover the ways in which certain unrelated elements are skillfully brought together in a context which allows for such a juxtaposition in selected Polish TV advertisements for various medicine and health-related products. The method employed is an in-depth content analysis of the material, followed by an attempt to integrate the identified mechanisms with the models of meaning-making mentioned above. The results will hopefully help in better understanding of the ways in which particular components of the context may interact with the message expressed verbally or pictorially in the construction of multilevel meanings in advertising communication.

The law is not effective in forcing the advertisers to communicate complete and reliable information about advertised products: the mere inclusion of written disclosures does not guarantee their successful perception, let alone comprehension. TV commercials are especially troublesome in this respect, because not only are the disclaimers presented in microscopic font size, but their display time challenges the perceptive abilities of even the most effi cient readers, not to mention the distracting effect of the simultaneously presented visual images and voice-overs. Yet, their effective comprehension could very often significantly modify the overall message and in this way lead to altered (often in a way unfavourable for the advertiser) persuasive effect. The study presents the ways in which the small print components interact with the information presented by means of the more conspicuous linguistic and pictorial items in a collection of 20 Polish TV commercials for erection stimulants. In particular, attention is given to the potential changes in the communicated message in the conditions of full comprehension and intake of the small print items.

The discourse of advertising offers an environment conducive to the exploitation of novelty in language. Novelty can be conceptualised as an opposite of salience (Giora, 2003), being also a graded feature. Giora claims that there exists a specific level of novelty, which evokes pleasurable experience in recipients. She proposes Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, which may be implied in the investigation of various types of discourse marked with high originality. The paper reports on two studies. The initial one, described in Wojtaszek (2011), focused on the appreciation of three alternative versions of Polish and British advertising slogans, while the subsequent one is the attempt to find a relationship between the previous fi ndings and the degree of legibility of the investigated texts. In the appreciation task the plain formulations received the lowest scores, followed by the highly innovative slogans, with the optimally innovative formulations ranking highest. In the task where evaluation of clarity was performed, the plain formulations turned out to be the easiest, the optimally innovative slogans were a bit more diffi cult, and the highly innovative ones the least conspicuous. A number of interesting dependencies were also found, suggesting further developments for the future.

The use of foreign language elements in advertisements is quite a common practice. Therefore, a large number of publications on this topic comes as no surprise. However, for the study purposes the researchers apply different perspectives and points of reference when it comes to defining what actually constitutes the use of foreign-language elements. The present paper offers a short review of those approaches, showing the discrepancies between various standpoints. It also addresses the methodological difficulties related to the application of clear-cut definitions. Given the variability of standpoints, it is suggested that the issues outlined in the paper need to be taken into consideration before any attempts are made at comparing the results of different studies of the problem.

The slogans and pictorial elements of press advertisements contain the most important elements of the message communicated to the viewers by the advertiser. They have to be formulated and composed in such a way as to ensure the most uniform reading and interpretation among potentially diverse recipients. It is interesting to what extent such an effect would be reported by relatively homogeneous respondents. The present study investigates the interpretation and recall of advertising slogans and foregrounded information by a group of 60 young people, following a short exposure to 5 press advertisements. It also attempts to compare the results to a previous research on mental processing of hidden and inconspicuous elements in press commercials (Wojtaszek 2007b).

The theory of politeness formulated by Brown & Levinson ( 1987) seems to be the most extensive and detailed model, covering a wide variety of issues contributing to the linguistic expression of the phenomenon. It has been successfully used by many authors (e.g. Sifianou, 1992) to account for the strategies used by communicators in a variety of contexts. The model has been developed to cover mainly the interpersonal, spoken type of communication. The present paper investigates the applicability of the theory to the description of the advertising discourse. As a special form of communication, with an untypical assignment of roles of the sender and the addressee of the message, and the predominant persuasive function, it is expected to reveal different tendencies in the use of politeness strategies, both in the communication between the characters appearing in the commercials, and along the sender-addressee dimension. Frequent application of stereotyping in the construction of advertising messages is another possibly significant factor. For the illustrative purposes the study uses contrastive samples of data, in the form of British and Polish advertisements, in the hope to discover certain tendencies prevailing in the advertising communication within the Polish and English environment.

Discourse Completion Test (DCT) became a very popular research instrument after the publication of the infl uential Blum-Kulka & Olshtain’s (1984) paper titled “Requests and apologies: a cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP)”. Hundreds and thousands of papers employing the data collection instrument, originally developed by Blum-Kulka in 1982, have been published since then, and the controlled elicitation procedure has left a very important mark on the way in which speech acts have been studied cross-culturally. DCT has its strong supporters as well as pronounced enemies, but its contribution to the development of the fi eld cannot be questioned. The paper presents an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the data collection tool, as well as a synthesis of the most important fi ndings which it has managed to yield so far. Major directions of research are summarized and possible future developments outlined.