Style shifting in commercials

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of style shifting in a corpus of Flemish radio and television commercials. Previous research draws attention to styling processes in advertising language, as discursive actions indexing social meanings. It will be shown that the exploitation of different stylistic varieties in our corpus can be analyzed along the same lines. The analysis presented here focuses on the use of ‘tussentaal’ (literally: ‘in-between language’) in the corpus, which is an informal variety of spoken Belgian Dutch, situated between the regional dialects and standard Belgian Dutch. In order to give a detailed account of the stylization processes, the style shifts between standard Dutch and tussentaal within a single spot are investigated. Furthermore, it will be argued that complementing the quantification of stylistic features with a statistical analysis considerably improves the analysis. More specifically, using a linear regression, the effect of a number of sociovariational factors on the style shifts in the commercials is investigated. The significant factors are then interpreted sociolinguistically, drawing on the concepts of stylization and audience design. Finally, it will be shown that the analysis can be extended to incorporate multilingualism in the commercials.