Ads PercentageDaily Consumer Goods 5 20 25% Technical Equipment 13 20 65% Service 7 20 35% Obviously, compound words turn up in 65% technical equipment ads, 40 percentage points higher than that of daily consumer goods ads; 30 percentage points higher than service ads. Compound words in technical equipment ads, are usually combined to give an exact description of a certain feature or a certain function such as high-volume, full-color, multi-functional, non-stop, water-cooled. Often numbers are employed in front of the hyphen, which is seldom seen in other advertisements, such as 64-bit, 24-valve, 4-wheel, 255-horsepower. This difference can be accounted for in terms of the different complexities of the goods. In comparison with daily consumer goods and services, technical equipment is much more complicated in function and structure. It is just the advantageous function or newly designed structure that the advertiser wants to highlight in technical equipment ads. Thus, the advertiser employs, even coins, so many compound words that they can make the introduction of complicated technical equipment brief and precise. Grammatically, compound words help to avoid using clause, which enhance the readability of advertisements. 2.3.4 Use of pronouns Pronouns of the first and second person: we, I and you outnumber the other pronouns in advertisements. It is because that you, we and I help create a friend-like intimate atmosphere to move and persuade the audience. Advertisements with lots of pronouns of the first and second person are called gossip advertisements. Here, gossip has not the least derogative meaning. It originates from old English god sib, meaning friendly chats between women. Advertisements that go like talking with friends closelylink the advertisement and the audience. The audience will easily accept a product, a service or an idea as if a good friend recommended them. Though pronouns of the first and second person are popular in advertisements, there are some differences in the use of these pronouns in the three kinds of advertisements. The first person we almost never occurs in daily consumer goods ads and technical equipment ads, whereas we is used in almost 80% the service ads in the corpus. The following are some examples. What can we do for you? So come on and join us as we celebrate MillenniaMania Singapore. …, we help our neighbors find the best ways to give to their favorite charities We’re stronger than ever. … There are two factors to explain the phenomenon. First, in daily consumer goods ads and technical equipment ads, a product is the focus of information. When the product needs to be mentioned, “it” is used, and in most cases, the brand name is used, even repeated to impress the readers. However, in service ads, service is actually the product. Since service is intangible,
3. Syntactical features
3.1 Similarities The purpose of all advertising is to familiarize consumers with or remind them of the benefits of particular products in the hope of increasing sales, and the techniques used by advertisers do not vary markedly. An advertisement is often merely glimpsed in passing and so, to be effective, its message must be colorful, legible, understandable and memorable. The rules governing the language of advertising are similar. We have summarized the lexical features of English advertisements. If words are leaves of a tree, and sentences branches; the branches must also possess their similarities. First, length of a sentence in advertising is usually short. A sentence in daily consumer goods ads has 10.3 words on average; in technical equipment ads, 11.8 words; in service ads, 12.3 words. Second, as to sentence structure, simple sentences and elliptical sentences are often used in advertisements. Compared with complex sentences, simple sentences are more understandable and forceful. Elliptical sentences are actually incomplete in structure but complete in meaning. The adoption of elliptical sentences can spare more print space, and take less time for readers to finish reading. In addition, a group of sentence fragments may gain special advertising effectiveness. Let us compare the following two advertisements. a. Baked. Drenched. Tested to the extreme. A Motorola cellular phone … b. The Motorola cellular phone are baked and drenched to extreme. |
