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Analyzing
Characteristics of English Advertisement Language
From the Perspective of Pragmatics
Xingrui Liu
School of
Foreign Languages, Yunnan Normal University,
Kunming, P.R. China
Abstract
Advertising guru
Ogilvie oncce said, advertising is the life of the
words. His words
point
out
the
importance
of
advertising
language
for
advertising.
In
the
fierce
competitive
contemporary
society,
businessmen
try
to
make
use
of
a
variety
of
advertising to promote
products and services in order to quickly expand
their products
in
the
market.
Because
among
various
kinds
of
advertisement,
a
distinctive
advertising
language plays a great role in selling products.
Advertising text is widely
concerned by
scholars at home and abroad because of its
remarkable characteristics.
Analyzing
characteristics of English advertisement language
from the perspective of
pragmatics,
it’s
not
difficult
to
find
harmonious
and
unified
context
is
beneficial
to
enrich
advertisement
information
and
promote
the
understanding
of
advertising
.
Smart
advertisers
will
often
hide
transfer
the
information
in
the
presupposition
of
advertising
language,
release
products
information
and
promote
products
in
the
market with the help of presupposition;
the
advertising language through
violation of
the cooperative principle
intentionally or unintentionally in public to
transfer products
information,
so
that
consumers
can
infer
the
conversational
implicature
instead
of
it’s surface meaning,
therefore
，
businessmen are
able to highlight the characteristics
and advantages of their products .
Keywords:
advertising
language; pragmatics; theory; usage
1. Introduction
Advertisements are getting their way
into our daily life: they may smile to us from the
television screen, shout to us from the
radio loudspeakers, wave invitingly to us from
1
every
page
of
the
newspaper
and
magazine,
pluck
at
our
sleeves
on
the
buses
and
escalators,
signal
to
us
from
roadside
billboards
and
flash
to
us
on
the
Internet.
Advertisements,
in
any
of
mass
media
communication
frequently
make
use
of
the
direct approach of rhetorical devices
to objectify appeals and enhance its persuasive
power.
However, when a large
number of marvelous advertisements flood into
another nation,
their renditions could
not always be as wonderful as the original and,
therefore, might
fail to produce
similar effects on the target audience. Puzzled
and stimulated by this
problem,
the
author
of
this
thesis
has
made
an
intensive
study
of
analyzing
the
characteristics of English advertising
language from the perspective of pragmatics to
find a way of improving the efficiency
of advertisement.
With
the
establishment
of
socialist
market
economy
and
the
rapid
expansion
of
economic
exchanges,
especially
after
China’s
entry
into
the
WTO,
international
economic activities become more
frequent and foreign trade more active. A
successful
advertisement,
fine in
the use of
words, sentences, and rhetoric in
order to
be new,
vivid
and
fascinating,
is
a
unique
and
crafted
product
of
creators.
Through
the
examples of English advertisement, this
paper mainly explores the way of improving
the efficiency of advertisement.
Advertising has become a
popular subject of numerous scholarly studies
approached
from
a
wide
range
of
disciplines,
such
as
anthropology,
sociology,
psychology,
linguistics, literary criticism,
aesthetics, marketing and media studies, for all
kinds of
advertisements have bombarded
each of us in our daily life. Advertisements from
the
highways, radio, TV
,
magazines, newspapers and the Internet invade our
ears and eyes
with
repetitive
message
and
arouse
our
attention.
Advertising
is
an
effective
and
critical
tool
not
only
to
promote
tangible
commodities
and
services
such
as
hairdressing but also to promote
economic, political, religious and social ideas.
The
essence
of
advertis
ing’s
global
significance
may
have
been
captured
by
the
British
novelist Noman
Douglas when he remarked, “You can tell the ideals
of nation by its
advertisements”
(Wilson,
1989:263). Therefore, the
study of advertising has taken on
new
significance.
2
Advertising English is a style of
immediate impact and rapid persuasion. The point
of
an advertisement is to persuade
people of the merits of a particular product or
service,
in
order
that
people
will
part
with
some
of
their
money.
In
general,
whether
the
medium
is print, radio or
television, the advertiser can rely on people’s
attention for
only a very short time.
Therefore, the sales message must be short, clear,
distinctive
and memorable.
The paper is composed of four parts.
The first part presents the main concern of the
thesis and its main theme. In part two,
a
general study of
advertising. Based on the
literature
review, we are going to know more about the
principles used to express the
usages
of advertising English. Then part three is devoted
to the study of the pragmatic
basis of
English advertising language. Part four is the
summary of this thesis.
2.
A General Study of Advertising
2.1 Literature Review
The
quality
of
advertising
language
to
some
degree
determines
the
effect
of
an
advertisement
(hereinafter
referred
to
as
“
ad
”
).
The
literature
of
the
earlier
period
include
Bovee
’
s
Contemporary Advertising
,
Higgins
’
The Art
of Writing Advertising:
Conversations
with Masters of the Craft
, and
Ulanoff
’
s
Advertising in America
,
while
Principles of Advertising
co-written by Monle and Carla follow
into the category of
recent
works.
These
publications
are
mainly
devoted
to
media
strategy,
marketing
planning process,
customer behavior, public relation and the ways
ads are presented
(size, color and
position), and seldom lay enough emphasis on
copywriting, which has
an indispensable
relationship with language. Furthermore, the part
organized around
copywriting only
clarifies advertising structure (namely, headline,
subhead, body copy,
slogan and
closing), copy devices (namely, format, design and
illustration), and ideas
of
how
to
bring
originality
to
copywriting.
It
seems
that
marketing
perspective
of
advertising has
overwhelmed its linguistic features, which is
generally considered as a
research
objective of studies by the linguists.
3
2.2 Definition
of Advertising
The English word,
advertise, means to draw something through
newspapers, handbills,
radio,
etc,
so
as
to
make
people
want
to
buy
it.
Up
to
now,
various
definitions
of
advertising
have
been
made
from
different
perspectives.
However,
the
underlying
function of
advertisement to inform and its ultimate goal to
sell remain unchanged. In
the
Britannica Encyclopedia: advertising is generally
defined as any openly sponsored
offering of goods, services, or ideas
through any medium of public communication.
Today,
the
widely
adopted
definition
was
put
forward
by
the
American
Marketing
Association:
“
Advertising is the
nonpersonal communication of information, usually
paid for and
usually
persuasive
in
nature,
about
products
(goods
and
services)
or
ideas
by
identified sponsors through the various
media.
”
2.3 The
Characteristics of English Advertising
Language
2.3.1 Lexical
Features
2.3.1.1 Using More Positive
Adjectives
Advertising language often
uses amount of modifiers to make advertising vivid
and
interesting
enough
to
appeal
to
consumers.
And
adjectives
become
the
preferential
choice.
The
British
linguist
G
.
rank
the
advertising
English
adjectives
according to their frequency in
advertising, the first ten are:
（
1
）
new
（
2
）
good/better/best
（
3
）
free
（
4
）
fresh
（
5
）
delic
ious
（
6
）
full
（
7
）
sure
（
8
）
< br>wonderful
（
9
）
clean
（
10
）
special
eg1.A brand new
Hyatt. A whole new feeling.(Hyatt
Hotel
）
good.
Fast food.(Top Shelf Fast
Food
）
2.3.1.2
Using Monosyllabic Verbs frequently
The
most basi
c feature of Advertising is
it’s
concise in choosing advertising
words,
and
the
most
eloquent
is
probably
verbs
and
adjectives.
While
monosyllabic
words
are often used .The
following monosyllabic words are used most
frequently in English
advertising:
4
(1) buy (2) see (3) get (4) use (5)
choose (6) feel (7) go (8) have (9) keep (10) give
(11)
like (12) look (13) love (14) need
(15) save (16) take (17) make (18) know
(19
）
come
(20)
enjoy
eg1.
The First Ever.
The Last You’ll Ever Need.(Seiko
wristwatch
）
eg2.
Three Letters that Bring the World Together.(YKK
zipper
）
2.3.1.3
The Innovative Onomatopoeia Combination
Often
making
use
of
the
homonym
of
words
to
make
advertisement
vivid
and
attractive in English advertisements,
For ’s never gone a sleeper
befor
e,
Because he wets the
bed...
(But tonight, with Goodnites,
that will change.)
Goodnites means Good
mornings.
There are a few words
selected from the Goodnite urine pants ads, this
advertisement
makes full use of the
homonym between Goodnite and Goodnight, stressing
that you
can have a wonderful overnight
sleep if you wear the Goodnite urine trousers,
hence
enjoying the fun of sleeping out,
it also and emphasizes a good sleep will guarantee
you have a wonderful morning.
eg2. InLondon Airport, there is one
line of words in front of a duty-free shop
nice
tripe.
Buy-
buy
！
At
first
glance,
as
if
it
is
wrong,
it
should
be
Bye-bye!
However
，
thinking
carefully,
“buy
-
buy”
reminds
you
of
buying
some
duty
-free
products before flying .It is such an
ingenious advertisement.
2.3.2 The
Characteristics of Sentence Patterns
The
often
used
sentence
patterns
in
English
advertisements
are
ellipsis
sentence,
imperative sentence and interrogative
sentence, and most of them are short and clear
with rapid rhythm, so it is easy to
remember. A lot of English advertising slogan has
been known to every household, for
example:
eg1. Come alive with Pepsi!
(Pepsi drink
）
eg2. Soft shoes for hard world.
(Ultrasoft women's shoes
）
Advertisement is fond of using a
variety form of rhetoric, according to statistics,
the
5
most important title of an English
advertisement document utilizing rhetorical has
the
proportion as high as 86%
(McQuarieer&Mick, 1992), the commonly used
rhetorical
forms in English
advertisements are
Jing,
1992:
278-283).
The
purpose
of
applying
rhetorical
is
to
highlight
the
key
information, on the other hand, to
attract the target audience.
eg1.I’m
more satisfied. Ask for More. (More
cigarette
）
eg2.
Opportunity
knocks
！
（
A real
estate advertisement
）
2.4 Functions of Advertising
As
is
known
to
everyone,
the
effects
of
advertising
and
advertisers
are
greatly
criticized in the
following aspects: 1) Advertising increases the
living cost because its
costs
are
added
to
the
prices;
2)
Advertising
encourages
the
wrong
values
in
our
society-
consumer
values,
make
people
purchase
things
they
do
not
need,
or
even
cannot afford. These
criticisms do really reflect the fact to some
degree. Nevertheless,
we should see the
other side of the coin. Advertising tells us a
great deal about our
society,
and
helps
to
influence
and
change
it.
Although
the
aim
of
the
ad
is
to
sell
products, its function
doesn
’
t stop there. In
practice, that is where it starts. Advertising
is
the
first
to
reflect
and
stimulate
social
trends.
Basically,
advertising
fulfills
the
following functions:
1)The Marketing Function;
2)
The Educational Function;
3) The
Communicative Function;
4) The Economic
Function;
5) The Societal
Function.
2.5 The Target
Audience of Advertising Language
Advertising
is
the
extension
of
human
communication,
it
origins
from
the
need
of
disseminating products
information
massively. The
ultimate aim of advertising is
to
create
the
attitude
and
behavior
which
is
conducive
to
sales,
the
British
linguist
Torben (1985) classified the
advertising functions as follows: 1) the
dissemination of
information; 2) the
shape of image; 3) to persuade the reader to take
action. Different
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