2.1. Review of theoretical background for the study
2.1.5 Individualism and Collectivism in print advertisements
Advertising is one kind of social action, cultural fruit, and the crystallization of human wisdom. Nowadays, with the rapid development economic and fierce market competition, advertising is indispensable tool for business enterprise, and it acts as vanguard of sale. In cultural environment, advertising reflects certain culture. That
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is to say, culture offers the background for advertising. In advertising, a lot of information involves just like the cultural knowledge, moral ideas, consumption concept, as well as enterprise culture. So advertisements have culture features and sense. Therefore, making advertisement process is also affected by different cultural factors which consist of IDV and COL. IDV&COL are extremely significant to contemplate while creating messages of every advertisement. Living in an individualistic or collectivistic culture also strongly influences the individual‟s comprehension and perception of advertising message. The reason is that individuals grow up in a particular culture and become accustomed to that culture‟s indigenous value system, belief, and perception process. Consequently, individuals exposed to an advertising message corresponding with their culture are likely to comprehend it better and possibly empathize with it, this comprehension and empathy could lead to persuasion, including the decision to buy the advertised products. As mentioned above, IDV and COL illustrate the ties between individuals and with their group or society. Meanwhile, advertisements are considered to be a means of communication between product suppliers and customers. A successful advertisement is created when an appropriate relationship between suppliers and customers is established through the messages in advertising. These messages should be created by people who deeply understand customers‟ culture, because the way they use language, communication styles (high-low context communication or direct- indirect communication), the way they express politeness strategies, as well as writing style will have important impacts on customers‟ perception of advertisement.
2.1.6. Individualism and collectivism in linguistics
Fasold (1984) stated that a national language encourages the development of social identity. Furthermore, there is a causal linkage of language influencing beliefs, derived from the Whorf (1940) (or Sapir-Whorf) hypothesis that language influences cognition. Another feasible connection between language and cultural
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values is offered by Triandis (1972) in the analysis of subjective culture. He shows that values are created from basic cognitive structures that come from lower-level abstractions of language, such as words, morphemes, and phonemes.
Nguyễn Hòa (2018) in his study “cultural values: some implications for culture- related linguistic research and intercultural communication” indicates that many current cultural studies use quantitative methods to conduct empirical researches, they pay less attention to linguistic functions. He also suggests a model of psycho- cultural linguistics that expresses the relation between three disciplines: cultural anthropology, linguistics and social psychology (Nguyễn Hòa, 2018: 08).
Figure 1: Model of psycho- cultural linguistics
Based on the above model, a pragmatic framework for analyzing language in use is offered by Nguyễn Hòa, including a three-step procedure: Describing, interpreting and explaining (proposed by Fairclough). His framework considers speech acts to be the minimal unit of analysis, focusing on the following items and their linguistic realizations such as speech acts (asserting, defining, or redefining, modifying, challenging and/or supporting identities), implicature (indirect speech acts), textual organization of speech acts into larger units of discourse (moves, exchanges, and discourse), the use of pronouns (I versus We cultural identity) and modality.
Cultural anthropology:
Cultural values
Social p sychology:
Communication , behaviors Linguistics:
Language in use
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E.S.Kashima and Kashima (1998) and Y.Kashima and Kashima (2003) concentrated on the linkage between personal pronouns and IDV. They proposed that explicit use of pronouns in a language places actor in the limelight, conversely, drop of pronouns de-emphasizes the actor and stresses contextual implications. It means that the concentration on actors rather than context illustrates a characteristic of IDV (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). Therefore, there is an intimate relationship between pronoun usage and individualistic manifestation in process of communication.
2.1.7. Speech act
Speech act theory is put forward by John Austin in the late 1950s. A speech act is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication (Austin, 1962). In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act that is performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the hearer identifies, in accordance with the speaker‟s intention, the attitude being expressed.
Speech act theory broadly explains the utterances as having three parts or aspects:
locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. A locutionary act is the act of uttering something containing literal meanings from syntactic, lexical, and phonological aspect. An illocutionary act is the act performed in saying something, which means we say something when we do it. A perlocutionary act is the effect or the consequence of saying something (Austin, 1962).
Types of speech acts can be distinguished on the basis of structure and general function. A fairly simple structural distinction between three general types of speech acts is provided, in English, by the three basic sentence types. There is an easily recognized relationship between the three structural forms (declarative,
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interrogative, imperative) and the three general communicative functions (statement, question, command/request). “You wear a seat belt” (declarative), “do you wear a seat belt?” (interrogative), “Wear a seat belt!” (imperative) (Yule 2008:54). Apart from distinguishing speech acts according to their general function, they can also be distinguished with regard to their structure. A speech act can be direct or indirect speech act.
Direct speech act
A speech act is seen as a direct speech act when there is a direct relationship between the structure and the communicative function of the speech act, or there is a direct congruence between locutionary and illocutionary forces. For example:
Communicative function Structural form Example
Statement Declarative He washed the dishes
Question Interrogative Who washed the dishes?
Command/ request Imperative Do the dishes (please)!
Indirect speech act
Searle (1979) introduced the idea of indirect illocutionary act which also known as indirect speech act. This is speaker's act of communicating with hearer more than what is actually said. It relies on the knowledgeable background information about the conversation shared by both speaker and hearer. In other words, indirect speech acts is the act of conducting an illocutionary act indirectly. For example: