摘要 本文旨在通过对书面英语广告的语言分析总结出广告英语在词汇﹑句法﹑篇章上的语言特点。为了使研究从数据出发得出科学结论，本文作者建立了一个拥有60篇各类广告的小型语料库。通过对此语料库中日用品广告﹑科技设备广告﹑服务业广告的深入细致的定量和定性分析，总结出广告英语在此三类广告中的相同点与不同点，并且根据语言的意义，风格及功能解释广告英语的共性以及广告英语在不同类型广告中的特殊性。

本文共分五个部分，第一部分和第五部分分别为介绍与总结，中间三个部分为本文核心，分别展开广告英语在词汇﹑句法﹑篇章三个层面的分析。本文的结论均来自于对语料库的分析。整个研究从数据出发，由数据驱动，由此进行语言学上的分析与概括。
关键词: 广告英语，词汇，句法，篇章，相同点，不同点

AN ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE FEATURES IN ENGLISH ADVERTISEMENTS

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical study of the language features of English advertisements at lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. In order to conduct a data-driven study, the author builds a corpus of 60 English advertisements. It is hoped that through the detailed survey of three types of advertisements: namely, daily consumer goods ads, technical equipment ads, service ads, similarities and differences in advertising language features can be summarized and possible reasons will be given in the light of the meaning, and function of language.

This paper will be presented in five parts. The first part is the introduction and the last conclusion. The focus of the paper is laid on the three middle parts which respectively analyze language features at lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. The conclusion of this paper is drawn from the data analysis. In the analysis, examples from the corpus will be given; figures, tables and graphs will also be offered to make the paper understandable and persuasive.

It is hoped that the study can shed light on the language features of advertisements and also provide help to copy writers and advertising English learners.

KEYWORDS: English Advertisements, Lexical, Syntactic, Discourse,

 Similarities, Differences

Acknowledgement

Sincere thanks go to Dr. Wei Naixing for his insightful guidance and earnest help all through the searching, analysis and paper-writing stages.

The author also wants to extend her thanks to Ms. Linda Frost who has given much help in data collecting.

  References

[1]  Bolinger, Dwight & Sears, Donald A. Aspects of Language third edition

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1981

[2] Bovee, Courtland L. & Arens, William F. Contemporary Advertising forth edition

   Homewood, IL: Irwin 1992

[3]    Gove, Philip Babcock Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co. 1976

[4]    Gregory, Michael Language Varieties and Their Social Contexts

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 1981

[5]    Jefkins, Frank William Advertising Philadelphia, PA: Macdonald and Evans 1985

[6]    O’Donnell, W. R. & Todd, Loreto Variety in Contemporary English

London: George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd. 1985

[7]    Roberts, William H. & Turgeon, Gregoire About Language second editon

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1989

[8]    Vestergaard, Torben & Schr der, Kim The language of Advertising

Oxford[Oxfordshire]; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell 1985

1.   Introduction

1.1 Rationale of the study

We live in a world of advertising. As potential consumers, we are endlessly bombarded with all kinds of product or service information from various media including newspapers, magazines, television, radio, posters and Internet, etc. Advertising provides a valuable service to society and its members, because it defines for consumers the meaning and the role of products, services, and institutions. It indicates the difference that exists between brands of products and alternative services, as well as the distinguishing characteristics of companies and institutions. Advertising also tells the consumer what a specific product, brand or service should do when it is used and thus helps him or her to understand and evaluate experience with the products and services that he or she uses. On the other hand, by making people aware of products, service and ideas, advertising promotes sales and profits. Finally, advertising is one of the major forces that are helping improve the standard of living around the world. Combined with all these communicational, marketing and social functions. Advertising becomes indispensable in the modern world.

Naturally, advertisements in English have become an important means of communicating ideas, demonstrating a variety of linguistic features of its own. The present study attempts to examine these features at the lexical, syntactic and discourse levels, in the hope of bringing them to light and, thereby, offering help to advertisement writers and language learners.

1.2 Definition of advertising

   According to the Definition Committee of American Marketing Association(方薇, 1997:2)

advertising is defined as follows:

Advertising is the nonpersonal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media.

1.3 Focus of the present study

    Usually, advertising communicates information in three types: audio, visual, and language. It is a more common case that an advertisement is a mixture of the three. In radio advertisements, music is always accompanied by language; on TV and motion pictures, music and language illustration are mixed with each other. In magazines and newspapers, advertisements are a combination of pictures and language of written information. Although music and pictures can provide some hints, or create a kind of atmosphere, the information about the product is limited. Even worse, it may lead to misunderstanding. Thus, we may say that language in a way provides more exact, detailed and dependable information whereas music and pictures only act as a supplementary means in advertising. Advertising language, playing a role of communication and persuasion, has developed its own features.

   This paper will focus on the language features of English advertisements at lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. It is hoped, by a contrastive study of advertisements on three types of products (daily consumer goods, technical equipment and service), similarities and differences of the three types of advertisements will be summarized and possible reasons will be given in the light of the meaning, and function of language.

1.4 Sources of data

All the advertisements studied in this paper are taken from English magazines. They are chosen from Time, People and Newsweek (issues from 1999-2000), because these three magazines have a huge circulation, covering all kinds of audience. Almost all kinds of advertisements can be found in these magazines. In order to get valuable information for the study, a corpus of 60 advertisements was built, which consists of 20 daily consumer goods ads, 20 technical equipment ads, and 20 service ads. Conclusions will be drawn through quantitative and qualitative studies of the data.

2 Lexical Features

2.1 Classification of advertising and its audience

Generally speaking, advertisements can be divided into two types: public relation ads and commercial ads. The former tries to advocate reputation for a social group, whose purpose is to leave a favorable impression upon the potential audience. The latter leads to the act of purchasing the products or using the recommended service. Commercial ads are much more presented through mass media for the reason that manufacturers and companies are willing to spend a large sum of money to make a certain product known or to boost the image of a certain brand. In some cases, competitors, like Coca-cola and Perpsi, even spare no expense to launch advertising campaigns to win over the market share. Commercial advertising can also be divided according to the target audience into two groups: consumer advertising and business advertising. Most of the ads in the mass media are consumer advertisements. They are typically directed at consumers. By contrast, business advertising tends to be concentrated in specialized business publications, professional journals, trade shows targeting at a certain group of people involved in some business. Since consumer advertising is most accessible to common people, the present study on will focus on consumer advertising. The classification of advertising is clearly shown in the following graph:

Graph 1 Classification of advertisements

      Public ads                           Daily consumer goods ads

    Advertising                        Consumer ads    Technical equipment ads 

         Commercial ads                                                 

Business ads      Service ads       

 The bold parts show the scope of advertisements we study. Daily consumer goods are necessities of daily life, such as food, detergent, hygiene, etc. Technical equipment is technical toys and electric equipment such as camera, vehicle, hi-fi, etc. Service covers bank, insurance, fund, etc.

Actually, advertising works effectively some of the time and doesn’t work other times. The single crucial reason that advertising does not work is that in specific instances the information it conveys never reaches the consumer at all, or is judged by the consumer to be either redundant, meaningless, or irrelevant. For example, a motorbike advertisement will probably be invisible to housewives on the lookout for new cutlery. Social status and individual interest decide that consumer goods ads are mainly targeting at women while technical equipment ads are largely aiming at men. The amount of shared knowledge between the advertiser and the audience together with the thinking habit of the audience directly influences the advertising language. Since products and audience change in every advertisement in order to achieve high advertising effectiveness, language used differs in different types of advertisements. Thus, in this paper we discuss not only the similarities of language shared by all types of advertisements but also differences of language used in different kinds of advertisements.

2.2 Similarities at the lexical level

In order to make the information accessible to audience effectively, the choice of words in advertising is very cautious and skillful. The aim of the advertiser is quite specific. He wishes to capture the attention of the members of a mass audience and by means of impressive words to persuade them to buy a product or behave in a particular way, such as going to Hawaii for all their holiday needs. Both linguistic and psychological aspects are taken into consideration in the choice of words. Sharing the same purpose of advertising－to familiarize or remind consumers of the benefits of particular products in the hope of increasing sales, the techniques used at the lexical level by advertisers do not vary markedly. The following points are some prominent similarities.

2.2.1 Few verbs are used

        G. N. Leech, English linguist, lists 20 most used verbs in his English In Advertising: Linguistic study of Advertising In Great Britain (方薇, 1997:20). They are: make, get, give, have, see, buy, come, go, know, keep, look, need, love, use, feel, like, choose, take, start, taste.

        All these verbs listed above are also popular in the corpus we built.

    You will often read such sentences in an advertisement:

    Buy x. Use it. We make… X will give you what you need. You’ll love x. Get x. Fox  example:

        We’ll make this quick. (Hertz Car Return)

    Get great coverage that’s so weightless and water-fresh. (ALMAY)

    All you need is a taste for adventure. (Millstone Coffee)

    You’ll love it even more with the 2.1 megapixel C-2000 ZOOM. (Olympus Camera)

    Don’t have much of a personality? Buy one. (Honda Motor)

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