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This paper examines the lexical meanings of the adjective ‘good’ in advertisement slogans. It shows how listeners can infer the meaning of ‘good’ and finally construct the ad hoc concept. With the relevance-theoretic approach, adjectives in advertisement slogans are generally a significant feature of describing the advertised items. However, the previous studies often focus on the issues related to the statistical frequency of adjective usages. Based on bestslogans.com websites, the slogans with the adjective ‘good’ were extracted and lexical and contextual information was analyzed to see its use and possible interpretation. The findings indicate that adjective ‘good’ shows extraordinary sensitivity to context, and a number of ad hoc concepts are identified. Results also show that inferring the meaning of an adjective needs thorough understanding of contextual information.
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- Publisher :The Modern Linguistic Society of Korea
- Publisher(Ko) :한국현대언어학회
- Journal Title :The Journal of Studies in Language
- Journal Title(Ko) :언어연구
- Volume : 38
- No :1
- Pages :7-19
- DOI :https://doi.org/10.18627/jslg.38.1.202205.7
The Journal of Studies in Language
