Abstract:
This thesis explores interactions between food, language, culture, and marketing in order to
recognize their convergence in food product advertising. Marketing, a field that blends the
studies of psychology, sociology, economics, and business, is not normally associated with
linguistics. However, by examining the link between them in isolation, and again through the
lens of diet culture, both semantics and pragmatics emerge as essential to the efficacy of the
advertising language that signals ‘health’ in a product. To understand how these linguistic
advertising tactics affect consumers’ perceptions of a food, I conducted survey research to gather
perceived ‘health’ ratings of various cereals solely based on their linguistic ‘health’ cues. The
results of this study suggest that there is a relationship between the language used to market
cereal and the consumer’s perception. Furthermore, these results implicate the influence of diet
culture as an authority in the field of food product marketing.
