| Having already permeated into various aspects of human life, advertising tells the consumers what function a specific product, brand or service is supposed to play when it is used, and thus helps him or her to understand and evaluate the experience with the products and services that they are supposed to provide. And by making people be aware of the conceptions of products, services and ideas, advertising, as a matter of fact, had consciously promoted the sales and profits of these goods. Advertising English, as the most important communicative vehicle of advertising, plays an important role in performing the goal of advertising.Many scholars have studied advertising English from different angles. But they have not adequately considered and analyzed its functions. And also they neglected that advertising English reflected some social cultural values, that is, the reflective function of advertising English.This thesis is devoted to the functional analysis of advertising English. Broadly speaking, advertisements have at least two functions: informing or persuading, although overlap may often take place in one single piece. The trick here is that an informative advertisement informs"the customer about good, services, or ideas and then to tell them how to get them by means of an identified sponsor."(方薇,1997) Examples of informative advertisements are not a few, ranging from flyers to insertions in magazines and newspapers, and all of these aim to advertise new products/services or special prices on products/services. This type of advertisements gives basic, factual information and sometimes shows a photo or illustration of products/services to give the target audience a better view about the advertised product. Persuasive advertisements are thus the instruments used by the advertisers who"have defined their target audiences and determined the effect they hope to achieve through persuasive advertisements in the media."(Guy Cook,1992)And a persuasive advertisement should try to persuade the potential customers to buy the new product. The persuasive function is not only limited to attracting the potential customer into buying a certain product, but also including the selling of services, values, ideas, and norms. And the author adopts a comprehensive approach with the semantic, pragmatic and psychological approaches as the main theoretical framework since advertising English is such a complicated phenomenon. And also because language serves as a major carrier of advertisements, a study of advertisements will be, in most cases, a study of the language itself. Building a corpus of 60 advertising English, the author makes an analytical study of the language features of advertising English at the lexical and syntactic levels.According to the functional analysis of advertising English, it has been concluded that advertising English, as the communicative vehicle of advertising, has its own specific linguistic features and functions. No matter the structure, or the content, or the words are used in an advertisement, all of these factors serve the purpose of attracting readers who are also the potential customers, of conveying information to them, and urging them to purchase certain products or to accept and use the propagated services. Besides the above-mentioned informative and persuasive functions of advertising English, it is clear that advertising language is also a kind of connotative language. That is, it does reflect the culture we are unconsciously in and the realities we are facing every day.The functional analysis of advertising English is not only of linguistic significance, but also of great social and cultural value. It shows us a new way to explain how and why English can act as an informative and persuasive tool to inform and persuade consumers and to explore the comprehension process. It can also help the English learners to comprehend advertising English from different angles. Meanwhile, it can help copywriters to cultivate the intercultural communication competence.
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