The Discourse of Classified Advertising Exploring the Nature of Linguistic Simplicity

Linguists who have studied simplified varieties os a given language, suchas pidgins or the language of caregivers, have tended to explain similarities intheir structure by the fact that they use the same mechanisms ofsimplifications. Bruthiaux tests this idea by looking at the the structure ofclassified ads in American English, using a body of 800 ads from fourcategories: automibile sales, apartments for rent, help wanted, and personalads.Bruthiaux's thesis is that strict, uniform constraints on space should resultin uniformly simple texts, no matter which category they are in, and that anyvariation would be due to the particular needs of each category. To prove thishe describes the linguistic structure of classified ads, and shows that they arecharacterized by a minimal degree of morphosyntactic elaboration. He thenexamines aspects of their conventions to highlight the role of pre-patternedand prefabricated segments whose collocational rigidity may force the inclusionof otherwise dispensible items. He finds that thereis indeed significantvariation across ad categories in terms of morphosyntactic elaboration, andconcludes that this is due to a greater or lesser need to be explicit, as wellas a greater or lesser anticipation of interaction. Finally, he examines theimplications of these findings for the study of linguistic simplification andregister variation.

Paul Bruthiaux teaches academic English in the American Language Institute at the University of Southern California.