r can add the believability that the narrative copy sometimes lacks. The characters portrayed in a print advertisement do the selling in their own words, through a testimonial or quasi-testimonial technique, or through a comic-strip panel. All kinds of ads can use this body copy , if necessary. For example:
When I want a CD done right, I do it myself. Yeah, this machine rocks. It burns full-size CDs that sound totally like the original. It plays CDs. Records CD to CD at double speed. And records off of just about any source. LPs. Cassettes. The radio. It’s even got a text display. Anyway, now I’ve got my own greatest hits collection. The stuff I want to listen to. I’ve got to admit it’s getting better.
5. Conclusion
Up to now, we have analyzed language features of ads at three levels. Linguistic similarities analyzed in this paper and shared by all kinds of ads are shown as follows:
Ⅰ. Lexical features
a. One-syllable and simple verbs such as get and make are used.
b. Emotive adjectives are adopted to arouse reader’s interest.
c. Words are carefully chosen to make pun and alliteration.
d. Weasel words, such as help and like, make the use of strongest language possible in advertisements.
Ⅱ. Syntactical features
a. Sentences in advertisements are short. On average, a sentence consists of 11.8 words.
b. Elliptical sentences are used to spare advertising cost and at the same time improve advertising e英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】ffectiveness.
c. Interrogative sentences and imperative sentences are common in advertisements
d. Present tense prevails in ads to suggest timelessness. And active voice is used to cater to audience’s habit in daily talk.
Ⅲ. Discourse features
A complete advertisement consists of five parts: Headline, Body Copy, Slogan, Illustration
and Trade Mark. Body copy is the key part, conveying product or service information.
While summarizing similarities of language features of three kinds of advertisements, we have discussed the differences between these ads on the following dimensions:
First, in order to achieve the highest advertising effectiveness, the advertiser precisely targets the audience by their social status, roles, income, educational background and gender. Therefore advertising language adjusts itself to get close to target audience.
Second, daily consumer goods, technical equipment and service are totally different advertising subjects. For example, some words in technical equipment ads are comprehensible only to those acquainted with that field. Take iMAC PC as an example. All the features of iMAC, plus: 400MHZ, G3 processor, slot-loading DVD drive, 10GB disk storage, dual 400Mbps FireWire ports, and iMovie video editing software. Laymen of computers must feel confused by these dazzling figures and units. However, in order to make the information of a technical product clear, some jargons are necessary. Th
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