tising? Table 1, based on the language of advertising (Torben Vestergaard & Kim Schr der, 1981:74), gives the commodity profile of two gender-identified magazines: Women and Playboy and also provides the distribution of the different types of advertisements.
Table 1 Distribution of three types of advertisements
Percentage of ads
Women (%)
Playboy (%)
Daily
Consumer
Goods
Hygiene
10
3
Beauty
18
1
Clothes
12
14
Food, Detergents
31
-
Tobacco
8
15
Beer, Spirits
-
25
Leisure
-
3
Technical
Equipment
Vehicle
-
27
Radio, hi-fi
-
4
Computer
-
7
Service
Insurance, banking
2
-
Others
19
It can be seen from table 1 that the hygiene, beauty, food and detergents ads are dominant in the women’s magazines while technical equipment ads prevail in men’s magazines. The reason is that women are potential purchasers of daily consumer goods while men are potential purchasers of technical equipment. So advertising language tries to win its audiences by noticing audiences’ gender identity.
In addition, since the subjects involved in advertisements vary from simple to complex, shared knowledge by the addresser (ads) and addressee (the audience) varies. For example, knowledge of technical equipment, sometimes de英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】mands high educational background or special interests in a certain field. To convey different knowledge clearly, advertisements don’t always speak in the same way. In the following section, we will make a comparative study of three points in order to find differences in the choice of words in three types of advertisements: the selection of adjectives, the use of compound words and the use of pronouns.
2.3.2 Selection of adjectives
Adjectives, as emotive and exciting words, are used to enhance the facts of a certain product or service. In the study of the selection of adjectives, we have first divided adjectives into two groups: descriptive adjectives and evaluative adjectives. The former is used in objective description and the latter give the advertiser’s subjective comments. Then we have listed those frequently used descriptive adjectives and evaluative adjectives in daily consumer goods ads and technical equipment ads, and we surprisingly have discovered descriptive adjectives differ from each other in two kinds of advertisements.
Table 2 Comparison of frequently-used adjectives
in daily consumer goods ads and technical equipment ads
Descriptive adjectives
Evaluative adjectives
Daily
Consumer
Goods
Ads
radiant, shiny, dazzling, gold
soft, smooth
fresh
creamy, crispy
clean
easy, convenient
rich, effective, crucial
healthy,
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