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ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma

Reference, image, text

in German and Australian advertising posters
R o d G a r d n e r a'* Sigrid L u c h t e n b e r g b
a Linguistics Unit, Morven Brown Building, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
NSW 2052, Australia
IBKM, University of Oldenburg, Ammerffinder Heerstrafle 114-118,
26129 Oldenburg, Germany

Received 15 October 1998; revised version 27 September 1999

Abstract

In this paper the authors discuss aspects of reference in the language of advertising, here
concentrating on posters, in particular billboards. The study examines advertisements from
Germany and Australia, with about 500 examples collected in the mid-1990s. The main focus
of the study is on types of phoric reference: first, the various types of endophoric reference;
second, exophoric reference, hereby distinguishing between poster-internal and poster-exter-
nal extra-textual exophoric reference, including the creation of meaning between text and
image; and third, homophoric reference to cultural phenomena. The relationship between
deixis and reference is discussed briefly in this context. 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All
rights reserved.

Keywords: Advertising; Phoric reference; Cohesion; Text and image; German; Australian
English

I. Introduction

Advertising posters frequently exploit the various sub-systems of language in a

number of ways. They play with, push, and extend the limits of language, breaking
rules, but nevertheless retaining coherence. Another characteristic is that they usually
incorporate pictures and other images into the message. Posters thus provide us with
an opportunity to explore what are often very brief texts indeed, but nevertheless fully

* Corresponding author. Phone: +61 2 9385 1454; Fax: +61 2 9385 1190; E-mail:
Rod.Gardner@unsw.edu.au

0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0378-2166(99)00117-4
1808 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg /Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

coherent and naturalistic texts. Their apparent simplicity provides us with an oppor-
tunity to explore the complexity of the way in which their meanings are achieved.
In simple terms, this meaning is derived from the perceiver's knowledge of lan-
guage as system and the pragmatic ability to make sense of an emerging text in the
context of the situation and of the sociocultural world in which the text occu(s.
Advertising posters can use resources of the system to make an impact, a very com-
mon one being the use of puns, which exploit the ambiguity potential of homonymy
and polysemy. These would appear to be more frequent in Australian (and British
and American) ads than in German (and French) ones (cf. Myers, 1994; Luchtenberg
and Gardner, 1997). Other common devices include rhyme, word coinage, syntactic
parallelism and alliteration. Posters also use contextual resources, often by invoking
in a witty or innovative manner a situational or sociocultural referent.
The focus in this paper will not be mainly on these resources; instead we will
explore the reference system in posters. The crucial question here is how the text
(the parts of the poster as a whole) makes meaningful reference: meaning derived
from the text internally, meaning from the interplay of text and image in the poster,
meaning from the immediate situational context, and meaning from the sociocultural
world of the consumer and reader of the poster. What rhetorical devices work across
text and image? This paper, then, is about the relationship between the verbal and
the visual in posters (cf. Goddard, 1998), seeing posters as complete, autonomous
texts. Text and image often have their own separate meanings, as ads exist that are
only image, or only verbal (though both are very unusual in posters). Very often,
though, the image alone or the text alone makes no sense - or at least not one that
coheres with what we know to be the purposes of advertising, such as persuading or
encouraging people to buy the products. As Goddard (1998) puts it, "the full extent
of [an ad's] meaning is not apparent until the reader has made sense of the verbal
text" (1998: 15). Text and image can be linked by deixis, so that the image, for
example, of a person is referred to as 'this woman', or 'she', or 'his mother'. In such
cases, language appears to refer to the image in the same way that it would refer to
a 'real' woman in the world. In other cases, this relationship appears to be more
complex. This paper explores one aspect of this complexity, from the point of view
of the reference system of language, specifically phoricity.
The examples used in this paper were collected in Germany and Australia in the
mid-1990s. The corpus thus makes it possible to compare ads from the two coun-
tries. The two sets show many similarities, but also some differences, for example
more widespread use of language other than the dominant local one and a tendency
to more use of cataphora in German ads, whereas the Australian ones use more
exophora. Better insights into the relationship between reference and deixis are also
provided through comparing ads in the two languages.

2. The nature of advertising and advertisements

Advertisements, according to Bolen (1984), need the following qualities to be

successful: believability, simplicity and readability, and they need to make careful,
 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821 1809

selective use of clichrs and superlatives, and create positive, widely understood con-
notations. The creation of signs in ads with these positive connotations has been the
subject of influential work by Barthes (e.g. 1984 [1977]) and Williamson (1978),
and is discussed further below. For Bolen, outstanding ads have stopping power:
people will take time out to read them; they make strong promises, which supports
one of their central functions of persuasion; they have headlines which work hard
with visuals (but what this notion of 'working hard with' subsumes is a complex and
fascinating aspect of ads that is not easy to unpack); they create positive feelings,
which creates the desires that, it is hoped, will persuade the reader of the ad to pur-
chase the product; and they are distinct (Bolen, 1984: 192-193). Ads can be humor-
ous, straight sell, or educational, and many are structured in similar ways. One finds
headlines, which point to benefits for the reader, arouse curiosity, ask questions,
command, or target a particular audience. The textual body may appeal to emotions,
or rationality, or both.
Posters (including bulletins, which are large-scale posters), as a particular type of
ad, are probably what people think of first as outdoor advertising (cf. Bolen, 1984:
376). They are typically printed, then taken to a site and glued to a board, though in
the past decade electronic posters and other innovations have become more frequent.
Some 'bleed' across borders to utilise the whole advertising space, others may be
illuminated, especially where many readers might pass in the night. They may even
be three-dimensional, or change every few seconds. Transit posters, rather than fixed
billboards, are found on buses, trains, and taxis, either as travelling displays on the
outside of the vehicle, or inside cards. Cards, as well as railway platform posters,
often have longer texts, as they may have captive audiences for up to 30 minutes
(Wright et al., 1982).
An advantage of posters is that people will generally see them and pass them sev-
eral times. Advertisers can choose their location to target their market. They are also
relatively cheap compared to many other forms of advertising, and their size can pro-
vide a strong impact. Disadvantages include the necessity for brevity (though this
can, if used well, create a strong impact). The industry suggests (Bolen, 1984) six
words or less, or readable in less than 5 seconds for the headline. As White (1980)
says, "except in [railway stations], where it is possible to while away waiting time
by reading quite lengthy copy, posters have to be very simple and directly commu-
nicative" (1980: 154-155). They are also, because of their 'street' location,
restricted to mass, not snob appeal, and are thus not suitable for all products. Further,
they may be cluttered amongst a bunch of other posters, and thus become lost.
In terms of their message creation, advertisements are complex messages, using a
number of channels simultaneously, which are synthesized into an integrated whole.
These channels include images, speech, gesture, costume, setting and text (cf. Dyer,
1982: 135). In Dyer's terms, an advertisement is 'semiotically thick' (1982: 136),
with a heterogeneity of signals and spatial as well as temporal dimensions.
Referent systems and metaphor appear to be crucial features of advertisements
(Forceville, 1996). As Williamson (1978) puts it, the essence of all advertising is that
"components of 'real' life, our life, are used to speak a new language, the advertise-
ment's" (1978: 23). Cultural and world knowledge context (what Barthes calls
1810 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

anthropological knowledge), which are not directly recoverable from the immediate
spatio-temporal, are recoverable through homophoric reference and the metaphors
created by juxtaposing image and text. A key purpose of adverts is that they must be
noticed, within normally strong restrictions on time and space (cf. Forceville, 1996),
and a poster specifically has to draw attention by simplicity in its design, presenting
the product so that it will also suggest a necessity for immediate action (Tipper et al.,
1986 [1915]).
Williamson focuses on a principal way in which this is achieved, through
homophoric reference, in particular to nature, science, and magic, and on how the
latter are used to achieve desire for the object being offered for sale by juxtaposing
the product with something (e.g. a person, another object) that possesses the object
for sale (cf. also Vestergaard and Schr~der, 1985: 153). This juxtaposing transforms
the systems of language and image into a new set of meanings, with the sign systems
(of language and image in the ad) becoming signs in themselves, and thereby locat-
ing a new signified (through metaphor and homophoric reference), conflating prod-
uct and nature, product and science, or product and magic. Homophoric reference
would appear to play a big part in this creation of new signs, but there would also
appear to be other parts of the reference system that contribute to this process,
specifically in the intricate ways in which language and image refer to each other.
Barthes (1984 [ 1977]) discusses this relationship of complementarity between text
and image. Unlike language, Barthes claims, all images are polysemous, with a
'floating chain' of signifiers (1984 [1977]: 39), from which a reader can choose
some and ignore others. Language is one way of fixing this floating chain, by
answering the question, 'what is it?'. In Barthes' terms, one operation of the text is
to 'anchor' the image, help the reader choose the 'correct' reading of the image, by
selective highlighting (cf. Forceville, 1996). This can be seen working very com-
monly in advertising posters. An example is the Yellow Pages ad, discussed below
(section 3.4), which has on the left a picture of a forest, and on the right a picture of
a golden compass, below which are the words Yellow Pages. The juxtaposing of a
forest and a compass has multiple possible meanings - it could, for example, be for
a ramblers' association. The placing of the words, though, anchors these possible
meanings in (only?) one reading.
A second type of relation between text and image is 'relaying', in which "text ...
and image stand in a complementary relationship" (Barthes, 1984 [1977]: 41). Here
words and image combine into a 'higher level' message, such as an unfolding story,
in which both are needed to create the story.

3. Aspects of reference in advertising posters

Posters, as many other types of advertisements, are composed of text and image.
A major difference between language and images is that the latter are much more
likely to have a 'naturally motivated' foundation - iconic or indexical or visual sym-
bols are rare - because it is hard to link an arbitrary symbol to a product, although
some logos, such as Mercedes or the Coke bottle, have this function (cf. Vestergaard
 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821 1811

and Schr~der, 1985). Frequently, the language 'anchors' the image by selecting from
amongst the floating chain of signifiers. It can also create meanings in tandem with
the image, relaying to a higher level message.
Today, advertisements, and many other types of text with words and images,
"involve a complex interplay of written text, images and other graphic elements"
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996: 15). Kress and van Leeuwen argue that there has
been a move away from 'anchorage', and that "the visual component of a text is an
independently organized and structured message - connected with the verbal text,
but in no way dependent on it" (1996: 17), and that we are beginning to understand
how these visual components have their own semiotic form. Such organization
emerges, for example, from a particular perspectival angle that may imbue the image
with a particular subjectivity. Perspective is, as they say, unique to images. Thus,
image and text work together to make meanings, and their differences can be
utilised. As an example, the verbal text of an advertisement may be "studiously
'non-sexist', while the visual text encodes overtly sexist stereotypes" (Kress and van
Leeuwen, 1996: 18). The question for us is to examine some ways in which image
and text work together through phoric reference, in order to come to an understand-
ing about the way in which images construct reference, often through an interplay
between image and text, and at times also without text.
Martin (1992) and Eggins (1994) present a typology of phoric reference in lan-
guage, comprising three major types: endophoric, exophoric and homophoric.
Endophoric reference is internal to a text. This is subdivided into three subtypes:
anaphoric reference, in which a word or phrase points backwards through the text to
a previous mention, for example by a pronoun standing for an earlier noun phrase;
cataphoric reference, in which a word or phrase point forwards through the text to a
later mention; and esphoric reference, in which a word or phrase links to another
mention of the same referent within the same noun phrase. The second major type of
reference is exophoric reference, which, in this typology, makes reference to the
immediate spatio-temporal context (or context of situation) in which the text is being
realised, for example through deixis. The third type of reference is homophoric ref-
erence, which is reference to what can be glossed as socio-cultural and world knowl-
edge, that is, some expressible that is recoverable neither from the text so far (text as
it is emerging), nor from the situational context, but from what Malinowski (1946
[1923]) called the context of culture. Martin's system is set out in the following net-
work (1992: 124):

context of culture ~ - preceding

(homophora) ~ (anaphora)
verbal ~ ~ - within group
(endophora) / (esphora)
context of situation --+
non-verbal
following
/ beyond group
(exophora) (cataphora)

Fig. 1. Typesof phora (Martin, 1992)

1812 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

This system was developed to account for phoric reference in linguistic texts. It is
hard to see how images can refer phorically, in particular endophorically, in the way
that language can (e.g. demonstratives, articles). Thus the 'red fern' poster discussed
below, with the picture of a red fern in a pot, would mean nothing (would refer to
nothing apart from iconically to a 'real' red fern in a pot) without, first, the language
(the incomplete sentence 'We'll even take you to ...'), and socioculturally derived
knowledge relating, first, to the context of situation (this is an ad on a bus for the bus
company), and second to the fact that there is a suburb in Sydney called Redfern
(homophora). Image alone would send the 'wrong' message. The power of image
lies, in ads such as these, in combinations with other semiotic systems.
Vater (1992) presents an alternative approach to this type of reference. He identi-
fies 'Anaphorik' (anaphora), identifying something which has been mentioned in the
text previously, 'assoziative-anaphorische Verwendung' (associative anaphora), in
which a part of something which has been mentioned before is mentioned (e.g. men-
tion of 'church' after a mention of 'village'), 'deiktische Verwendung' (deixis),
which is more or less equivalent to Martin's exophora, and 'abstrakt-situative Ver-
wendung' (abstract-situational reference), more or less equivalent to homophora.
Martin's system appears to us to be more parsimonious and coherent, and provides a
sufficient starting point for our analysis below.
Of the types of reference mentioned by Martin, Williamson (1978) has presented
a rich account of homophora in advertising. She builds on the work of Barthes, in
particular his discussion of denotation and connotation, to explain the way in which
image and text work together. Using an ad for Chanel No 5, which has simply a
photo portrait of Catherine Deneuve juxtaposed with a picture of a bottle of the per-
fume, Williamson argues that the photo denotes Deneuve and connotes 'chic French-
ness'. This is achieved by a transformation of the denotative sign (the photo is a sig-
nifier, SR, denoting the signified, SD, Deneuve), into a signifier itself (the signifier
is the image of Deneuve, which connotes the signified 'chic Frenchness'). Diagram-
matically, she represents this process in the following way:

CONNOTATIVE SIGNIFICATION

The imageof Cath6rineDeneuve 'Chic' Frenchness

SR SD

SR ~ SD
Image Cath6rine
Deneuve
DENOTATIVESIGNIFICATION
Fig. 2. Significationin ads (Williamson, 1978)

What is being connoted in advertisements such as this comes from the broad, cul-
tural world of which readers of ads are members - in Martin's (1992) and Eggins'
(1994) terms, this is homophoric reference. Williamson extends her analysis to an
 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821 1813

in-depth study of aspects of homophora, in particular of transformations of nature (or

'cooking' nature, as she puts it), science, and magic. Of nature in particular, she says
it is "the hunting ground for symbols, the raw material of what they are all made"
(1978: 109). These symbols, then, are not the content of the advertisement as a rep-
resentation of what the parts of the ad mean, but a re-using of these signs without the
material content or the historical context (1978: 167). The denotation of the signs
has been 'totally effaced and they have been made to point inwards to the ad itself
and the product it is selling' (1978: 167). Advertising, for Williamson, "seems to
consist of a 'bricolage' of other social myths" (1978: 173).
Language in this is the primary referent system, "a system of meaning whose
frame the ad can use, but does not generate" (1978: 84). The relationship between
language and ad is that language can create "difficulty and opacity" (1978: 85),
helping us in a deciphering of the second system, the ad. So there is a kind of rank
shift from language as its own system of signs to language as a sign in itself, as part
of the system of signs of the ad.
The rest of this paper will, in one sense, attempt to extend Williamson's analysis of
homophora and present examples of other types of phoric reference in ads. The impact
of ads depends to a large extent on cultural references through homophora, but as we
show below, reference in ads works in other ways, deriving from the interplay
between text and image. The system of phoric reference described by Martin (1992)
has been developed for linguistic texts. However, as has become apparent from the
discussion above, image and text work together to create a new set of meanings,
which raises some questions of the directionality of reference that language based
models of phoric reference do not need to try to answer: at times the text makes no
sense without the image, and vice versa, but understanding can be achieved both by
looking at the image first and then reading the text, and the other way around. In a
similar approach, Cook (1992: 156) distinguishes between single and multiple
exophora, whereby he refers mainly to the use of personal pronouns in advertisements.
A final point on phoric reference in ads is that it is only language, and not images,
that refer in this way. For most ads we examined, the language, in Barthes' (1984
[1977]) terms, anchors the image. The direction of reading may be first image and
then text, for example (for readers with left-right/top-bottom literacies) where there is
a large image in the upper part of the ad and a small text at the bottom. But it is only
after the text has been read that any referents can be located, be they within the ad -
endophoric to the ad as unified text - or beyond - exophoric or homophoric. Phoric
reference works by referring to something 'known'. In the cases examined by
Williamson, this 'known' may be cultural or world knowledge (homophoric). In
many of the cases discussed below, an understanding by the reader of what is referred
to is only achieved after both image and text have been processed, so that the image
(or part of it) becomes known, and then the reference in the text can make sense.

3.1. Exploiting resources o f reference

In posters, there is usually not a contiguous (second) text to derive contextual (or
cotextual) meanings from. Endophoric reference, like other forms of textual coher-
1814 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

ence, is therefore less pervasive in posters than in many other text types, and indeed
often completely absent. The texts are often too short.

3.2. Anaphora and cataphora

Anaphora and cataphora work in posters in the same way as in other linguistic
texts, so two examples will suffice to illustrate this. Here is one of the few examples
of anaphoric reference from an Australian poster for contact lenses:

You can't play Rugby with glasses. Is that why it's called a contact sport?

It, here, refers anaphorically to Rugby.

Cataphora, on the other hand, is found fairly frequently in German ads, as in:

Das muss man einfach lesen. Simmel.

'You simply have to read this. Simmel.'

Here the demonstrative das refers cataphorically to the author, Simmel, and, as a
form of metonym, to his book.
Cataphora appears to be much more common in German ads than in the Aus-
tralian ones, where we found very few.

3.3. Image and text

When we look at image and text, there is often some kind of conflictual meaning
construction operating. Sometimes the text appears to activate one schema, only to
be subverted by the image which then activates another. One example is a poster in
which there is a picture of a bottle of pale beer with the brand name on the label.
This could have been a poster with a very simple message, and probably unmemo-
rable. The text, however, activates a schema of a quite different type, namely loss of
suntan in the winter months:

It's natural to go pale in winter.

Either of these schemata could be activated first, which raises the question of
directionality of reading: do we read image first and then text, or text first and
then image? Europeans, with a long history of left-to-right/top-to-bottom reading
may well use this directionality in reading multimodal texts such as ads. This is
likely to be culturally determined. As Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) suggest,
"cultures which have long-established reading directions of a different kind [from
European] (right to left or in columns from top to bottom) are likely to attach dif-
ferent values to these positions ... and the way they use [margin and centre, left
and right, top and bottom] in their signifying systems will have relations of homol-
ogy with other cultural systems, whether religious, philosophical or practical"
(1996: 199).
 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821 1815

An extreme form of images in posters linked to the text is when they are incorpo-
rated into the lettering and wording. One example is from a poster campaign by a
Sydney bus company. This series of posters was presented as a puzzle. The text is:

We'll even take you to

followed by a picture of, for example, a Concord airplane, a pot with a red fern, a
picture of the Mona Lisa wearing a veil, a sheep with a wooden gate as part of its
torso, a frowning king with steam coming out of his ears, or a black bird's head with
a nest on top. The syntax of this poster suggests that a noun phrase (such as a place
name) would follow the preposition to. The solution to this puzzle requires local
knowledge. Even Sydneysiders frequently had to puzzle over the meanings of these
ads. (The pictures represented suburbs of Sydney: Concord, Redfern, Mona Vale,
Ramsgate, King's Cross and Crow's Nest respectively).
Here again, the image alone would make little sense. Even if a reader deciphered
the link from 'image of red fern in a pot' to 'suburb named Redfern', this alone
would make no sense. The image has, so to speak, to be translated into the proper
name for its unique reference to become apparent, and be incorporated into the syn-
tax of the written text. In this case an arbitrary sign, a symbol, is replaced by a non-
arbitrary, representational sign, an icon: there is a shift, so to speak, towards the sig-
nified, which makes it possible to decode this use of language that breaks out of the
confines of conventional language use. In such cases, it seems that the image has
become a sign on the same level as the symbols of language, but of a different sign
type. However, it requires the link back into the syntagm of language, to the symbol,
for it to be understandable, as a 'red fern' is not 'Redfern'.

3.4. Poster-internal reference

Quite often the interplay between text and image uses the phoric reference system
in a way that is different from phoric reference in purely written text. It sometimes
seems to be playing around the boundaries between endophoric and exophoric refer-
ence. Exophoric reference is generally considered to be reference in the language to
the spatio-temporal context. Very often in posters, however, the reference in the text
is to the image, that is, to an inherent part of the advertisement as a unified con-
struction. This is achieved in various ways. A clear example of one that works very
like classic exophoric reference is this German one:

Wo, bitte, gibt's denn die?

'Where can you get these, please?'

This very simple advertisement is accompanied by a picture of a sausage, with its

poster-internal exophoric die ('these') referring to the sausage. The speaker of this
question is not pictured. Somewhat more playful is this one:

Das tr~igt man diesen Sommer.

'This is what people are wearing/carrying this summer.'
1816 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg /Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

The picture here shows glasses of beer on a tray. Das refers deictically to the tray of
beers, frozen, so to speak, into the advertisement as multimodal text. The effect of
the advertisement, of course, is achieved not by the reference, but by the ambiguity
of tragen in German, to mean 'wear' (here with connotations of being fashionable)
and 'carry'. Whilst there are elements here of exophora (pointing outside the text),
there are also similarities to endophora: the das could be read within this multimodal
text either cataphorically, if one reads the text before the image, or anaphorically, if
one reads the image before text. This bidirectionality of reference is found frequently
in posters, and thus differs from a purely linguistic deixis, in which the reference is
unidirectional, from text-internal to text-external (cf. Ehlich, 1983).
A similar example from Australia is for a brand of chewy sweets.

It's at times like these you need Minties.

In one advertisement in this series, there is a cartoon of a woman who is cleaning her
house, and has inadvertently vacuumed up her cat so that only its tail is sticking out
of the end of the tube. The word these is a token of spatio-temporal deixis (but
poster-internal, word to image deixis), a form of exophoric reference to an undesir-
able situation.
In other posters, there is bidirectionality without this poster-internal exophoric
reference being present, making it coherent without being cohesive. The sense of the
text in the next example, an Australian poster, only becomes full with the support of
the picture, and the picture makes little sense without the text:

New Reserve Shampoo

In other words, the language (the product name) does not refer to the image, and at
the same time is more than a mere naming, as it is accompanied by a picture of a tap
with a cork in it, suggesting lack of water, and thus indicating that the product is a
dry shampoo.
Similar is the following one, for the Guide Dog Association:

Tax Retriever

with a picture of a guide dog. Despite the capital R, it would seem unlikely that the
text would make sense without the picture of the dog, and knowledge that this is
for a charity. It uses punning, of course, on retriever, as getting a return (on tax)
and as a breed of dog, but also homophoric reference, as one has to know that
donations to charities are tax deductible. Here coherence is achieved by a clash of
schemata.
Australian Yellow Pages uses poster-internal coherence in another way: not by
direct phoric reference, but by the image calling up idioms, and thus language and
meaning, to provide a kind of unstated text. This one has no words apart from:

Yellow Pages
 R. Gardner. S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821 1817

The picture is in two halves. On the left is a picture of a forest, connoting perhaps
confusion, and recalling the idiom 'You can't see the wood for the trees'. On the
right is a picture of a golden compass beneath the words Yellow Pages: so the tele-
phone company's Yellow Pages help you find your way through the forest of outlets
for products and services. The juxtaposition of Yellow Pages and the golden com-
pass is reminiscent of a pronoun referring to a noun phrase, whereby a pronoun in
English is generally understood to refer to the most recently mentioned plausible
antecedent. In speech this is temporal, in this ad it is spatial. There are, of course,
differences from speech, such as the fact that there is no pronoun in the ad, as well
as the symbolism of the image of the compass.
However, the point about examples such as many of these is that the reference
cannot be easily classified as anaphoric or cataphoric or exophoric. On the one hand,
there is often, as in the 'Yellow Pages' example, nothing in the text referring to the
picture (i.e. no cohesive device, no overt reference). However, the juxtaposition of
two pictures leads one to construct meanings that could be expressed as a linguistic
text such as 'If you try to find a product without Yellow Pages, you won't be able to
see the wood for the trees. If you do use them, we will lead you there as sure as a
golden compass'. These kinds of ads exploit homophoric reference, and a back and
forth between image and text, until a linguistic sign (word, idiom, proverb) is
retrieved. In a country such as Australia, cultural expectations probably also play a
role here: texts make sense, and the reader is likely to search for meaning until it is
found.
There are other cases, such as Das triigt man diesen Sommer or It's at times like
these you need Minties, where the reference of das and these seem to be working
very much like exophora, but within the boundary of the poster. They make sense by
their juxtaposition (at text level in the same way the incomplete sentences above
were completed by images filling syntactic slots).
Another point is that these posters can be read either way, i.e. one can look first
at the image and then at the text, or vice versa (though the structure of the ad may
lead one first to one or to the other), but the full meaning is only achieved by look-
ing at both.

3.5. True exophora

True exophoric reference beyond the poster is also found, and indeed seemed
almost to be a fashion in Sydney at the times the examples were collected. An Aus-
tralian one has this text in a children's charity advertisement, which uses exophora
in a way that has a long tradition in advertising:

We depend on you, so she won't have to depend on anyone. Northcroft Society.

The accompanying picture is of a physically disabled child. This has the deictic you
referring to the reader of the ad, a technique used famously in the World War One
Kitchener poster, Your country needs you, with the army general's index finger
pointing towards the reader. The Northcroft Society ad also has poster-internal
1818 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

phoric reference with the she referring to the picture of the girl, and cataphora with
the we referring to the Northcroft Society.
Another type uses reference not to the reader, but to the physical surroundings of
the advertisement, such as this one for a toothbrush that uses the length of the side
of one of the relatively few articulated buses in Sydney:

To show a flexible brush - you need a flexible bus.

It shows a picture along the side of the bus of a toothbrush with a flexible piece in
the middle of the handle across the articulation in the centre of the bus, so that it
flexes as the bus turns a corner.
Posters referring to the physical surroundings are much more frequent in Australia
than Germany, where one does find ads on buses and trams, but none that we found
with reference to the vehicle itself.
A further Australian example is:

Please do not lick this bus.

This is on a background of a large picture of ice cream, the text placed over the pic-
ture. This example seems to be at the boundary between poster-internal exophoric
reference and true exophora: the whole side of the bus is painted as an ice cream, but
the text refers to something that has existence outside of the poster, namely the bus.
There is, though, an incongruence here: 'lick' collocates with, for example, 'ice
cream', but not with 'bus'. There would thus appear to be multiple references at
work here.
A similar instance is from a series of ads for soup found at the back of buses, the
first line in large letters, the second in a smaller font size:

Sorry mate, but this one's full

of big chunky bits of vegetables and pasta.

The image on this poster was of a bowl of soup, with brand name. This has dual ref-
erence: poster-internal exophora to the picture of a full bowl of soup and poster-
/text-external exophora to the bus full of people. It is possible, even likely, that the
reader will first be drawn to the bus by this one's f u l l (the bus looms large before
one's eyes, and the expression is familiar in this context), but the alternative (and
necessary) reading, if the ad is to be effective is to the bowl of soup: namely, that
the bowl of soup is full of something. This ad demonstrates well the tension between
two readings.
One final example of this type is for a low alcohol beer, Toohey's Blue, again
at the back of the bus where car drivers could read it, and giving the brewers
an air of social responsibility for supporting campaigns against drinking and
driving.

If you're not drinking Blue, this bus is for you.

 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821 1819

German examples of true exophora tend to come from road safety campaigns:

Erlauben Sie mal

... Ihrem Partner das Einf~ideln.
'I ask you
... to let your fellow driver in.'

Sind Sie noch ganz dicht

... hinter Ihrem Vordermann?
'Are you right
... behind the driver in front?'

Both of these address not only drivers passing the hoardings, but also action and
actors on roads. These are both punning advertisements: Erlauben Sie mal meaning
'Please let' as well as 'What do you think you're doing' or 'I ask y o u ! ' , and Sind Sie
noch ganz dicht meaning 'Are you too close behind' and 'Are you crazy or some-
thing?' or 'Are you right (in the head)?'.
These posters exploiting exophora are good exemplifications of the playfulness of
copywriters in stretching 'traditional' boundaries between endophora and exophora,
between worded texts, images and the spatio-temporal context of the ad's (moving)
locus.

3.6 Homophora

Under this heading we include reference to sociocultural phenomena, some of

which, as the Sydney bus company ones (like 'Redfern' or 'King's Cross' mentioned
earlier), evoke highly local knowledge, while others call upon more widely held knowl-
edge. This is a vast category, examined in detail by Williamson (1978). We present just
a few examples here. A German example of the latter is from a series for butter:

Feingold. Kerrygold. Das Gold der grtinen Insel.

'Fine gold. Kerrygold. The gold of the emerald isle.'

Goldauflage. Kerrygold. Das Gold der grtinen Insel.

'Gold plated. Kerrygold. The gold of the emerald isle.'

(It is not only in Germany that Ireland is known as the griine lnsel, or emerald isle.)
From Australia, an advertisement for a fruit drink:

It's fruit Jim, but not as we know it.

In order to understand this fully, one would have to know that this is based on a
catch phrase from the long-running cult science fiction series, Star Trek.
Many of the ads we found appeal to local geographical knowledge, such as this
one by a railway company:
1820 R. Gardner, S. Luchtenberg / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1807-1821

Visit your sisters.

The accompanying picture was of the spectacular rock formation and tourist attrac-
tion in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, known as the Three Sisters.
In Germany, too, local sociocultural knowledge is necessary to understand many
posters. For example:

Liebe Narren und N~irrinnen, Ohne Ftihrerschein ist das ganze Jahr Aschermittwoch.
'Dear fools and 'foolesses', without a driver's license it's Ash Wednesday the whole
year.'

One of the authors found that even German students who lived outside the regions
where Carnival is celebrated had a great deal of difficulty understanding this poster.
N a r r e n und Ndrrinnen is a form of address used only in the Carnival season (neces-
sary socio-cultural knowledge if one is to understand this homophoric reference).
Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and the day after the end of the frolics and
excesses of Carnival, which is considered the 'worst day of the year' by real fans of
the celebrations. This anti-drink-and-drive campaign uses the end of the Carnival
season to suggest something even worse: losing one's driver's license on top of
everything else.

4. Conclusions

In this paper, we have examined forms of reference which provide some insights
into the ways in which poster advertising works. At the same time, we have illus-
trated some forms of reference which traditional linguistic approaches to phoric ref-
erence or deixis do not deal with, in particular the interplay between linguistic text,
image, and the context of situation. Wordings may refer to something else within the
poster (to other words, to images) or to something outside the poster (frequently the
vehicle or the road), as well as to broader cultural references. Where posters bleed
out of the traditional (rectangular) frame, it sometimes becomes difficult to say where
the poster ends and the situational context begins, but it is precisely this indefinite-
ness that is sometimes exploited by the creators of these ads. The analysis here has
been possible by drawing on recent research into images (e.g. Kress and van
Leeuwen, 1996), and linking this to more established discourse analytic approaches.
Readers of ads, after all, have to make these links between wordings, images, context
of situation, and the wider context of culture. Reference, and particularly phoric ref-
erence as we have discussed it here, is of course only a small part of the complexity
of poster ads, and in particular of the ways in which words and images interrelate.

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Rod Gardner lectures in Applied Linguistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
His main interests are language teaching, conversation analysis and forensic linguistics, and this joint
project in the language of advertising opens up a new field of interest. He has a Ph.D. from the Univer-
sity of Melbourne in brief conversational responses, and is currently working on a book for Benjamins
on receipt tokens.

Sigrid Luchtenberg lectures in Applied Linguistics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, where
she is presently Professor of German as a Foreign Language. She has a Ph.D. in German Studies from
the University of Bonn, and a habilitation in multicultural education from the University of Essen. She
has published multiple papers in the fields of multicultural education, German as a foreign and second
language, language varieties. This latter interest has led to the joint project on the language of adver-
tising.