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inct from the characteristics of other discourses. Thus an analysis on the linguistic features of advertising English in the linguistic field is worthwhile. Under such circumstances, a study on the linguistic features of advertising English will have practical effects on the composing and translating work of the copywriters. And it is certain that both in China and many other countries like America, England, and Australian, people have done many researches around advertising. Lots of papers and articles have been written on this subject. No other statement could have summed up the charm of advertisement than what Aldous Huxley has commented. As he has said advertisement as a literary form is the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, and the most pregnant in curious possibilities. In his comment he asserted advertisement is a literary form and the copywriting process is the delightful and salubrious exercise for the mind. Therefore, it is worthwhile studying the linguistic characteristics of advertising English so as to get a better understanding of it and have a better demand of English. In this paper, all instances are of cosmetic advertising. 1. An Introduction to Advertising 1.1 History of Advertising Advertisement emerged from the womb of commodity production and exchange. The condition for the existence of advertising is “at least a segment of the population must live above the subsistence level”. When this situation occurs，it also becomes necessary for “the producers of materially ‘unnecessary’ goods to do something to make people want to acquire their commodities” (Vestergaard and Schroder 1985). The embryonic form of advertising in the world is street cries, which exists even today. Advertising was not unknown in ancient Greece and Rome, but advertising as we recognize it did not start until the seventeenth century in the West. It was at about this time that newspaper began to circulate. Before that, it is printing which was first invented in China and then introduced to the West that played a vital role in the production of print advertising. “Classified” (small ads) types of advertising were dominant before the nineteenth century and style and language used in ads at that time tended to be direct and informative. The industrial Revolution, which began in England in the mid-1700s and reached the United States by the early 1800s, facilitated mass-production of goods. Meanwhile advertising became more and more important in the industrial market. The great breakthrough for advertising came only in the late nineteenth century. Technology and mass-production techniques were then sufficiently developed for more firms to be able to turn out products of roughly the same quality and at roughly the same price. This brought on a crisis of over-production and under consumption which meant that the market needed to be stimulated by advertising. At this time advertising changed its function from proclamation to persuasion. In the twentieth century, advertising developed rapidly alongside the advent of new media-radio and television in succession. According to Richard Pollay’s content analysis of two thousand print ads from ten leading magazines in the USA, ads have progressively turned towards the emotional rather than the informative approach and there is a shift seeing human nature as rational to seeming it as emotional. Today in China, while our economic structure is shifting from the entirely planned economy to