Publications

Publication details [#62018]

Grundlingh, Lezandra. 2016. Interpreting ‘PJ Powers’: A relevance-theoretic approach. Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa 47 (2) : 246–268.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Routledge

Annotation

One 2015 ad for Spar's liquor store, TOPS, employed the motto ‘Seize a drink and display those PJ Powers’. The singer, PJ Powers, inculpated Spar of employing her name sans her consent and of ridiculing her prior alcohol addiction fight. Reckoning with relevance theory's chief hypotheses, the potential mean South African's common knowledge and the ad's co- and context, it is explained that South African consumers are very probable to relate the lexical co-occurrence ‘PJ Powers’ to the singer and not to a ‘pyjama party theme’ proposed by Spar in its excuse. A small newspaper text corpus, two distinct corpus analysis tools, Antconc and Leximancer, and a Google search are emplyed to bolster these arguments. Keywords: context, co-text, lexical co-occurrence, PJ Powers, Relevance Theory