b. Elliptical sentences are used to spare advertising cost and at the same time improve advertising effectiveness.
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. Therefore different kind of ads speak different language.
The study has shown that three kinds of advertisements in the corpus respectively demonstrate their own unique language features.
In daily consumer goods ads, descriptive adjectives tend to convey senses of sight, taste, and touch in the hope of satisfying women's appeal for beauty and comfort. No jargon is used. Headlines of daily consumer goods ads tend to ask question to arouse the interest of audience, especially women's. The body copy seems not so important and essential as that of the advertisement for products requiring high technological information, thus in some cases body copy is omitted in daily consumer goods ads.
In technical equipment ads, descriptive adjectives largely play the role of conveying information. Compound words, particularly compound jargons, are frequently used to exactly introduce a complicated product. Headlines of technical equipment mean to attract readers by transferring the unknown information of a product, so they are often information/news headlines.
In service ads, the use of pronouns, we and you, is statistically significant. You and we almost appear in every advertisement. “we”, as replacement of a certain service, is used in almost 80% the service advertisements. Institutional copy is often used to sell an idea or the merits of the organization or service rather than sales features of a particular product. Often institutional copy is also narrative in because it lends warmth to the organization. Banks, insurance companies, public utilities, and large manufacturing concerns are the most common users of the institutional copy.