Linguistic Features Of English Advertisements

Advertising is an inescapable part of modern life. In our country the advertising business is now in the ascendant, playing an immeasurable role in promoting sales of commodities and prospering our economy. Hence, advertising business and advertising language are increasingly finding favor in people抯 eyes because of their peculiar charms. In order to establish the firm position of our domestic products in the world trade and competition, it is not only necessary but also urgent to study the advertising language and the Chinese-English advertising translation. Advertising is a broad subject involving many aspects. Its main function is to appeal to customers?reation, feelings, attitude and so on to reach the goal of promoting sales. In the case of advertising, the relation between the general communication model and the actual situation is as follows: The addresser is the advertiser, and the addressee is the audience, the meaning transmitted is about the product, the code is language and some sort of visual code, the channel consists of printed publications, and the context will include such features as the audience抯 total situation, the publication, etc. This dissertation makes a thorough examination of the linguistic katures of English advertisements on the lexical level, syntactic level, discourse level and their rhetorical devices. The use of language for advertising may have its own characteristics, but these special characteristics are built upon a general language, over which an additional element is superimposed because of the special nature of content. All the characteristics of common language, for example, arbitrariness, linearity, intertranslability, creativity, novelty, semanticity exist in the language of advertisements. In fact, the language used 48 Linguistic Features vi English ~4 dvc抮iise,,iei its in advertisements can be seen as the characteristics of common language exploited at its best. Though there are certain similarities between the underlying processes of the common language and the language used for advertising, one can all the same distinguish the language of advertisements from other common uses of a language. One may feel the peculiarity of words and sentences in the language of advertisements. Chinese and English share a lot of similarities in advertising. Linguistic means are -a exploited to the limit in both cultures to ensure the expected effects on the audience. In both cultures, phonological, morphological, syntactical, grammatical. semantic and even discoursal means are employed. Secondly. cultural elements are widely employed to affect the audience抯 feelings, attitudes and actions in much the same way. These el~ments include globally appreciated values and culture-specific values. In both cultures, globally appreciated values like happiness, love. friendship, beauty and security are exploited as themes in advertising. These similarities are very important in cross-cultural communication, especially in advertising. Actually, it is them that make advertising translation possible. The study of linguistic features in English advertisements will serve as the basis for comprehending English advertisements and Chinese-English advertising translation. The good mastery of the knowledge of these features will certainly pave the way to produce excellent English advertisements. This dissertation will be beneficial to those...