Make Up or Made Up? Intra and Interlinguisitic Messages in the Globalised World of Cosmetic Advertising

This paper proposes to review the advertising license that has increasingly made its mark over the past century by manipulating language for purely promotional ends. In a contrastive qualitative analysis, of advertisements of the same product or kind of cosmetic product published in the country of origin (USA and the UK) and abroad (Italy), texts will be compared in both a diachronic and synchronic perspective, according to their varying message content and inherent distinguishing linguistic features. With the aid of a small corpus of comparable English and Italian texts (collected from corporate websites and individual magazine adverts over the past two years), this contribution will provide an in depth discussion of such phenomena as lexical boosting, the coining of new words, relexicalisation and unusuality (Partington 1996), as well as word patterning in the context of advertising creativity. Significant findings will be checked by means of further investigation using the Webcorp, to discover whether recurrences are limited primarily to cosmetics or extended to other products or services, or indeed, semantic fields. By limiting the area of investigation to the advertising of cosmetics, findings will necessarily focus in part on the synaesthetic metaphor with heavy exploitation of the senses over the years: lipsticks are luscious, delicious, juicy (taste); they are smoothie and make lips feel a certain quality (touch); ingredients of cosmetics may offer “a healthy looking dose” (sight); the name of a lipstick, e.g. Pink Giggles, implies sound; and fragrances naturally, but not only, refer to the sense of smell (Lily & Spice). Furthermore, the analysis will identify some collocation mixes again pertinent to the synaesthetic metaphor (e.g. mouth watering colours, delicious shades). Results also provide examples of unexpected semantic prosody where negative connotations become positive: the concept of plumpness moves to the confines of positive prosody when describing lips. Likewise, the dramatic effect gained with unusuality can be noted in the juxtaposition of components in the noun phrase (e.g Man-eating colours; lethal lipstick colours). With reference to the complex structuring of information content in extended pre-modified noun phrases that describe the intrinsic quality and purpose of a product in English, the second part of the paper will provide results from a more contrastive analysis of the above phenomena in relation to the foreignising and domesticating strategies (Schaffner 1995, Venuti 195), exploited in maintaining similar yet different messages in present-day promotional cosmetic ads published in Italy, that are more or less readily understandable to a native and non-native readership in the increasingly globalised world of marketing. Thus it will focus on the mixing of languages in complex Italian noun phrases that present new hybrid compound forms (e.g. Lancôme: Nuova maschera Viso Turnaround 15-Minute Facial) at the extreme end of the scale of interpretability, and also culturally specific references in an international context (e.g. Dolce and Gabbana’s Sicily rather than Sicilia perfume). In conclusion, taking inspiration from Bhatia’s (1993, 2002) studies regarding genre analysis as a reflection of the complex realities of the world of institutionalised communication, results from the analysis will show the extent to which flexibility, as far as comprehensibility of meaning is concerned, is permissible in the creative manipulation of promotional language across cultures in the globalised world of cosmetic advertising.