A Pragmatic Study of the Interface Between Informativeness and Conciseness in the Language of Advertisement of the Nigerian Print Media

Language is the chief medium of communication used for all forms of social interaction, the most important of which is passing and receiving information and messages. Advertisement also a form of communication, relies on language to pass its message in order to attract consumers to what it is advertising. This study, which is a pragmatic analysis of the interface between informativeness and conciseness in the language of advertising of the print media, focuses on the informative content as well as the conciseness of the adverts. Information cues such as price, quality, nutrition, packaging availability etc are used to assess the informative content of the adverts. An advert that contains one or more of these cues, is regarded as informative.

The study also adopts Grice‟s cooperative principle to analyse the invisible meaning contained in the advertising slogans. The presence of hidden meaning from which readers are left to make inferences generates implicatures which readers derive, in order to make meaning out of the adverts. Fifty (50) adverts were selected and analysed. The findings reveal that, most advertising slogans are not informative in themselves. Readers have to rely on the additional information given, to fully understand the advert. Also revealed is that, an advertisement that seeks to be informative is not concise, while too an advert that seeks to be concise is not informative.