On Morphological, Syntactic, Rhetorical And Sexist Characteristics Of English For Advertising

Ubiquitous in many aspects of the world, advertising has aroused great interest of linguists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, aesthetes and communications experts. Since the 1960's, researches have been undertaken on the subject of English for advertising by many foreign scholars who have employed various linguistic theories in their studies and accomplished a great number of illuminating books and articles. By comparison, Chinese scholars are beginning to make a systematic and penetrating achievements in this area. This thesis attempts to provide a comparatively comprehensive and systematic account and analysis of the style of English for advertising.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction of advertising. It probes into the nature of advertising by way of citing Coke's advertising management policy. Then a comparatively precise and concise working definition of advertising by American Marketing Association (AMA) is given. After this, the author illustrates two different means of advertising: visual and audio. The first means usually contains the headline, the body copy, the slogan, the supplementary items, the illustration, the trademark, the brand name, the decorative border and white space. The second, composed of advertising commentary, music and sounds, is used extensively in broadcast, television, movie, etc. In this thesis, only the analyses of the language used in the headline and the body copy are concentrated on. At the end of this chapter, the author states the focus of discussion in this thesis, i.e. the morphological, syntactic, rhetorical and sexist characteristics of English for advertising.In Chapter Two, the thesis explains what "English for advertising" refers to and for the first time the author presents to the readers the concept of "style" of English for ads, which is to be the focus of attention in this dissertation. Furthermore, the author mentions the overall features of English for advertising, i.e. according to G. Leech, in order to serve the functions of advertising, the language must have attention value, memory value, readability and selling power. To be more precise, the language has to be attractive, interesting, memorable and persuasive. At the end of this chapter, the author introduces the principle of AIMA (Attention, Interest, Memory, Action) into the thesis. They can be considered under the respective...