Linguistic charactersitics of print advertisements

It is quite understandable that very thorough and precise work is to be done before an advertisement is presented to the reader. When millions of dollars worth of business depend on the success of a single advertisement, then it is natural that the person making an advertisement should weigh thewords and the ways in which they are arranged in the text just as carefully as any poet does.As Nilsen puts it in the book Language Play. An Introduction to Linguistics “in many ways advertisers are today’s pop cultural poets” .

The text of an advertisement should be understandable, memorable and persuasive. For this purpose there is a variety of linguistic means of advertising. According to traditionally distinguished levels of language they can be divide

The third major feature in advertising lexicology is the usage of specific terms. The advertisers try to create trust in the product by mentioning some technical parameters or speaking about the results of certain tests that should show the good quality of the product (You’ll get empowering technology with the convincing performance of a 32-valve 305 bhp Northstar V8 combined with sophisticated safety features and technical innovations that give you control in various driving situations.).

In the texts of advertisements one can often notice exclamatory intonations. We can even say that exclamation is a typical intonation in advertising as it attracts the attention. Exclamatory sentences have a function of signals, of a call for action: Do it!; Buy Brown’s Boots Now!

You’re into free love.Of food. So you want to experiment a little. Tiger prawns, spring onions and yellow oister mushrooms, swimming in a sweet and sour sauce perhaps? Far out. Served with Ryvita made purely from rye, water, a pinch of salt and a sprinkling of sesame seeds, your mind can be of a singular mode. Peace.

Epanorthosis can be thought of as the inverse of a rhetorical question. Here one makes an assertion straight out with the purpose of rendering it uncertain or dubitable, as in this ad for a Ford truck: “Chances are you’ll buy a Ranger for its value, economy and quality. Yeah, right.” Rhetorical question and epanorthosis require the message recipient to correct the sense, replacing the meaning conventionally linked to the expression with a meaning that better accords with the context of interpretation.

Irony capitalizes on opposition. Consider this headline for Range Rover: “The British have always driven on the wrong side of the road,” accompanied by a picture of the automobile driven on a steep slope off to one side of the road. To understand this headline, the consumer must be aware that the British drive on the left side of the road, and that the left side is the correct side in Britain, even though it seems wrong to those accustomed to the alternative. The message recipient may then further reflect that for a 4-wheel drive vehicle, the “wrong” side of the road (i.e., off the road altogether) is the “right” side. Yet other reflections may also ensue about how it is wrong for an auto to leave the road, but right (pleasurable, advantageous) not to be bound to the road. The point is not that each message recipient will make all of these inferences, but that the advertiser’s choice of a message that signifies the opposite of what it at first appears to signify has a destabilizing effect that liberates a variety of meanings for consideration.

Some topics in this essay:
Northstar V8, Toyota BMW, Boots Apart, Range Rover, Nurofen Advance, Served Ryvita, , E-business Evolution, Introduction Linguistics, Fabric Softener, message recipient, simple sentences, lexical means, figures speech, compound sentences, rhetorical question, phonetic lexical syntactic, verb “stops”, lexical syntactic, phonetic lexical, advertising language, compound + simple, nurofen advance text,