54 min listen
Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, “Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You” (Wiley, 2011)
Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, “Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You” (Wiley, 2011)
ratings:
Length:
46 minutes
Released:
Feb 24, 2012
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
We’ve never been in a more crowded marketplace, with more corporations shouting for our attention and custom. Yet this choice is an illusion, as detailed in Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You (Wiley, 2011). Using a battery of techniques, advertisers push us into recognising and ultimately choosing their brand. But forget crude commands to buy buy buy; advertisers are using sophisticated approaches which work with, not against, our cognitive abilities of memory, attention and language.
Here is a book where the corporate and academic worlds meet head on. Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both serious researchers in the cognitive and language sciences, exemplify and analyse the ways in which advertisers and political candidates target their market. Familiar techniques of branding and personalisation exploit linguistic features such as presupposition, implicature, metaphor, audience design, speech acts, sociolinguistic variation, and syntactic framing.
But can an awareness of these techniques put us in a better position to choose how we choose? I talk with Julie Sedivy about the nature and the illusion of choice, and how advertisers may come knocking on linguists’ doors for expert advice on how language, and the language user, works.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Here is a book where the corporate and academic worlds meet head on. Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson, both serious researchers in the cognitive and language sciences, exemplify and analyse the ways in which advertisers and political candidates target their market. Familiar techniques of branding and personalisation exploit linguistic features such as presupposition, implicature, metaphor, audience design, speech acts, sociolinguistic variation, and syntactic framing.
But can an awareness of these techniques put us in a better position to choose how we choose? I talk with Julie Sedivy about the nature and the illusion of choice, and how advertisers may come knocking on linguists’ doors for expert advice on how language, and the language user, works.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Released:
Feb 24, 2012
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Tore Janson, “The History of Languages: An Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2012): It’s a sobering thought that, but for the spread of English, I wouldn’t be able to do these interviews. In particular, I don’t speak Swedish, and I’m not going to try to speak Latin to a world expert on the subject. Fortunately for my purposes, by New Books in Language