SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

144 ' Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes
pretation of this claim, under the legal doctrine of puffery, is to discount it as
the expected inflation by an interested party, rather than to expend energy eval-
^uating^hêTrum-vaTuèTo .
Courts originally drew the line between puffery and misrepresentation by
distinguishing-statements that, on the one hand, magnifyjhe advantages or qualities
a product in fact has to some degree from statements that, on the other hand,
invent or falsely assert the existence of qualities which the product does not dey
monstrativefy possess. This distinction suggests that the legal understanding of
this type of communicative routine was that the product description's being patently
inflated or personally slanted functions itself as an obvious indexical sign—
a warning, in fact—of the biased attitude of the seller. In other word's, exaggerated
predication signals the motivated intentionality characteristic of sellers and
alerts buyers to take a skeptical attitude. The expressed opinion or exaggeration
is the clue for buyers to know that they are dealing with puffery rather than
purported factual claims, despite the well-formed propositionality of the utterance;
and the presupposed context of the persuasive sales talk signals the applicability
of the rule of interpretation which constructs the proper functional assignment
of such opinions and exaggerations as mere puffery.
What emerges from these initial observations is the existence of two levels
of linguistic competence, the first level involving the mastery of referential or
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prepositional codes and the second level involving a shared metasemiotic stan-
''••„. dardjoxxule^nriterpretation: in contexts of commercial persuasion, predicative
exaggerations iudex the inflated opinion of seller rather than the qualities of the
object being referred to. The legal term "puffery" is, then, an officially re-
,-gimented qethnometapragmatlc^jSSilverstein 1976) label, that is, a meta-level de-
-strfption örtne complex pragmatics of advertising astontextually understood
oommercial speech.
So for an utterance to be a puff it must provide, through a combination of
r)r^jjipo«sed-eontext ("sajgjîï) and fcreativeindexicality (/'exaggeration") a second-level
message: "take this as a puff!" Combined with a general skepticäiättitude
towarthsalespersons cïïârâcteristic of the caveat emptor era, this metamessage
at least partially guarantees that consumers will properly disambiguate the
formal/functional skewing of acts of puffery. The legal recognition of this power
to disambiguate is documented, for example, in Berman v. Woods (33 Ark. 351
[1881]), where the Court stated:
As for the glowing representations with regard to the merits of their^[printing]
press, made by the plaintiffs in their [advertising] circulars, they are the usual
3T^£^LSJ^^T
P r>^
T
^~ Cpf these assumptions contributes to the construction
of an\ ideology of reference Which not only irons out the multifunctionality of
advertising language but which also imposes a false set of interpretive standards
about advertising m-general. From a functional point of view, in contrast, advertising
is persuasive speedji, that is, discourse designed to get the consumer to
change an attitude toward a product or to strengthen an awareness of a company
or brand label in the hope that purchasing behavior will be modified accordingly.
In other words, while the tradition of caveat emptor constitutes a general background
warning that commercial speech is basically persuasive, the modern regulatory
environment assumes, falsely, that commercial speech is primarily referential,
contributing valuable information essential to rational markets.
Unfortunately, in spite of this institutionalized shift in the surrounding ideology,
the actual commercial function of ads has remained constant, namely, persuasion.
The role of puffery has correspondingly reversed: from being regarded
as the socially expected norm for commercial speech, puffs have come to be con-