It is a commonplace for analysts of contemporary American culture to point out the powerful impact of advertising on the development of a "culture of consumption" characterized by the shift from production to consumption as the source of socially recognized values and the creation of artificial or symbolic needs unrelated to relatively more objective use-values. What is less clear, however, is precisely how advertising succeeds in this manipulation of the collective consciousness, that is, how the pragmatic functions of advertising communication are achieved. My argument here is that the effectiveness of advertisements cannot be understood apart from what Silverstein (1979) has called "linguistic ideology," that is, a culturally determined, historically grounded set of interpretive standards for understanding linguistic and by extension visual communication. In other words, messages of any sort are received in the context of explicit and implicit understandings of how language and non-verbal codes function. To make an argument parallel to Silverstein's (1985) paper on gender categories and Mertz and Weissbourd's (1985) work on legal ideology, I will argue that modern consumers' understanding of advertising is significantly skewed by an institutionally regimented view of the nature of commercial speech and, further, that this official ideology is so far from being an accurate account of the form and function of advertising messages that their manipulative potential derives at least in part from enforced consumer misunderstanding. And the argument will go one step further to claim that the senders of advertising messages, namely, the agencies representing commercial interests, are fully aware of this disjunction between the nature of advertising and the available interpretive standards and have in fact structured their commercial messages to maximally exploit this gap. The global pragmatic function of advertising becomes, then, a result of the combination of its "communicative character" (e.g. the ways language is employed, the role of visual images, and the presentation of value-laden symbols) and the surrounding ideology which reinforces consumers' interpretive standards (e.g., assumptions about whether or not ads are to be believed, awareness of the official informational function of commercial speech, and knowledge of existing government regulations).

The basis for the argument which follows consists of a study of the legal and regulatory decisions dealing with commercial speech, a review of empirical research done by others on the impact of certain deceptive forms of advertising on consumer beliefs, and continuing analysis of linguistic and visual forms of contemporary advertising on television and in magazines. In all three of these areas my research is at a beginning stage and the conclusions of this paper are entirely provisional and suggestive of further work.

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