THIS LUNAR NEW YEAR, LET OUR CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA FILL YOU UP WITH THE JOYS OF SPRING. TOPPED WITH A MOUTHWATERING SPREAD OF DICED BBQ CHICKEN, CHICKEN FLOSS AND PINEAPPLES ON COOL LIME MAYONNAISE, IT OFFERS A DELIGHTFUL EXPLOSION OF FLAVOURS YOU'LL WELCOME HOME THIS SPRING.

There are numberous things to talk about regarding this extremely hilarious PIZZA HUT ad. All it takes is just a quick glance of the sentence to make a mockery out of this ad in its quest to be novel and creative. An effective way to go about marketing its pizzas and to stand out from its adversaries? Perhaps! Given that chinese new year is approaching, Pizza Hut advertisers must be obssessed with this whole notion of a joyous occassion for celebration, a time where family memebers gather together for a hearty meal, engaging themselves in endless conversations amidst the occassional outbursts of laughter, young children greeting and wishing their elders a happy new year accompanied by a string of chinese idioms to signify prosperity , luck , health, etc. In light of this fetive occassion, it is no surprise that advertisers put in a great amount of effort in ensuring that the theme of their ads encapsulates the festive dynamics of a celebration t oplay up to this festive mood. Hence the incorporation of terms like cherry blossom, delightful, joys, welcome home. Firstly, let me try to interpret this advertisement:
1.) Since chinese new year is a festive occasion and a joyous one, OUR PIZZAS CAN BRING JOY TO YOU BECAUSE IT IS A CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA (NOT AN ORDINARY ONE) a hawaiin pizza cannot bring as much joy to you during chinese new year.
2.) Our cherry blossom pizza DOES NOT SIMPLY BRING YOU JOY BUT IT FILLS YOU UP (TO THE BRIM) WITH JOYS OF SPRING after consuming them. This is analagous to that of an empty container being filled to its brim by another medium that possesses a certain quantity of liquid which will be transferred to the empty container when the action of pouring is conducted. In this case, the pizza becomes an object that possess a certain quantity of an object X which will can fill up another medium only through the process of transference. That explains why I am dubious about the way this choice of lexical items used by the advertiser sounds strange since no process of transference is involved. I would have replaced the word fill with bring such that we generate a sentence as such:OUR CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA BRINGS YOU THE JOYS OF SPRING. Again, I am being critical here. What on earth is joys of spring? Can we say "joys of winter, summer, autumn? " I know very well that the word 'spring' is indexical to the lunar new year but supposedly I am not a chinese but somebody of another race and culture, I would not be able to see this connection between spring and the lunar new year and such a message will appear very "alien" to me and if I should want to order the pizza by virtue of the fact that the image of the pizza appears very interesting and novel, I might consider not doing so simply because the description of the pizza does not seem to make sense.
The ad could have done better by saying OUR CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA BRINGS YOU THE JOYS OF THIS FESTIVE SEASON ! TOPPED WITH A MOUTHWATERING SPREAD OF OF DICED BBQ CHICKEN, CHICKEN FLOSS,AND PINEAPPLES ON COOL LIME MAYONNAISE! Ok, another problem here, COOL LIME MAYONNAIS! I can see that the advertisers are trying their very best to play around with words in the hope of capturing the attention of its customers and also to promote the uniqueness of their pizza as a commodity that will eventually be purchased and consumed.
I went to the collins cobuild concordance sampler typed the word mayonnaise and from a corpus of 100 phrases, I saw some phrases like "lemon mayonnaise".Thus, lime mayonnaise would be perfectly fine. But what about the adj cool modifying the NP lime mayonnaise? Based on the concordance sampler, I found NO phrases similar to cool lime mayonnaise. ADJ ADJ NP does nto seem to be reflected in the sample.
Doing a google search: If you look at the first page of google.co.uk, there are alot of sentences with the NP lime mayonnaise. Going over to google.com (US), the same results are obtained as well. However, if you were to search under google.sg, interestingly there are 2 instances where cool lime mayonnaise appeared. However, these were taken from Pizza Hut's website. Thus on the whole, we could generalize that while lime can be prime with mayonnaise, cool being primed to collocate with lime mayonnaise poses a problem.
I realize I am being very long winded here since blogs are supposed to be succint but yet I feel there is a necessity to explain everything in detail by penning all my thought processes down on this blog.
Another problem that this advert has is the VP offers a delightful explosion of flavours. It has dawned on me that analysis of a short phrase is tedious, needless to say an entire sentence. So what are the problems here? 1.) The priming of the word explosion and PP of flavours. 2.) the VP offer an explosion (omit the adj first since the adj merely modifies the explosion) .
My findings based on the concordance sampler: ...your choice of flavours
.....amazing range of flavours
.......with layers of flavours
...........A really good balance of flavours
So there were no instances of explosion of flavours.
My findings for explosion: explosion of diverse styles ....
explosion of micro and phantom midge.
explosion of anger
explosion of expressionist writing
Ok, based on what I have here, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way the words are primed to collocate with to one another. The next thing to do is to consider the semantic meaning and to see if such a phrase has been used by people today and if so, are there any constraints to this? Example, is this phrase used only by a certain community of people or is it uniquely in a particular country?
So again, googling the phrase seems to be a useful tool to answer my doubt on this. Again, we see that the phrase explosion of flavours are used by the americans, brits and australians themselves.
What are your thoughts about delightful explosion? Again, googling the phrase delightful explosion, it was observed that there was no such instances in the US and British context. Yet in the Singaporean context, we do get instances as such: delightful explosion of contrasting taste and textures /with its delightful explosion of colours.
What could account for this?Is this part of our Singapore Standard English ? Is it right to say this? Apparently there is nothing wrong with the grammatical structure! Yet why is it that the Native speakers of English do not use a pharse like this?
To conclude, I am going to say that this phrase is part of standard singapore english. As we all, English was exported to the rest of the world mainly as a consequence of colonization. The English brought to each colonized country was the Queen's English which as a result of many factors, such as geographical, social factors can bring about a change in the language. Also, it is crucial to highlight that even though English is a first language in many countries across the globe, the english that we all speak are very different , be it syntactically or lexically. Of course this is not to deny that these varieties are unintelligible. Another thing I would wish to highlight to myself is that,every language used in a community or a large social groups serves a crucial purpose which is none other than communication. Thus, the choice of words that we use may differ from another variety of English to suit our communicative needs. We create and invent certain phrases, appropriate it into our own community which can best express what we would like to say. It is fallacious to say that there exist, in today's society a STANDARD English ! English has attained its status as a World Language and today we see it manifesting in different forms. Today, we have what we call American Standard , Singapore Standard, Malaysian standard English , Indian Standard English all with its own unique linguistic features.