All roads lead to advertising: use of proverbs in slogans

This paper presents a research on the use of proverbs in written advertising texts from Portuguese press. The analysis focus on the presence of the proverb in the text both changed and unaltered. The different strategies of transformation are presented. Introduction Proverbs are wise sayings, short definitions of wisdom (Mieder, 1999). When we hear or read the sentence “All roads lead to Rome” we will easily recognize that we have encountered a proverb. It will, for sure, sound familiar. This characteristic is used in advertisement slogans in order to attract the reader’s attention. Being familiar with the sentence, the reader will feel more involved and the product will be presented as something close to the consumer. The corpus of this research includes forty three written advertisements published in Portuguese press and also in outdoors, all of them including a proverb in the slogan. In our corpus, these proverbs are sometimes left unaltered. But most of the times some kind of alteration is made to the sentence. In this paper, we show the type of changes performed in these slogans and their importance to the persuading power of the message. Several strategies are used to modify the proverb such as: lexical exchanges, syntactic alterations, elisions. The use of proverbs and these strategies are also present in other text types, namely literary (Duarte Mendes, 2000; Nunes; Duarte, 2004) and journalistic (Coimbra, 1999). Altered and unaltered proverbs In our corpus, we noticed that in the great majority of the cases there is an alteration of the fixed form of the proverb. As can be observed in Figure 1, the difference is notorious. In fact, there are 13 cases in which there is no transformation on the linguistic form and the meaning of the proverb is also preserved. ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006 ISCA Archive http://www.isca-speech.org/archive