An Analysis Of Language Features In English Advertisements

People in today's world are living in the sea of advertisements. No matter you like it or not, you can't escape the influence of it. Newspapers, magazines, radios and TV programs, even the flyers a stranger gives to you on the street, are full of advertisements. Many people may get sick of seeing or hearing them, but no one would deny the fact that advertisements provide us with information about the fast-changing world as much as we need.Businessmen use advertisements as an effective tool to publicize and sell their products; whereas, the writer of this thesis, as an English learner, is more interested in the language used in the advertisements in English.This paper first tries to explain the need for doing such a study and the reason why the writer has chosen the written form of advertisement as his research topic. Following that is a discussion of the previous studies related to the present study. The next important element of the paper is its theoretical framework: critical discourse analysis which is also the theoretical foundation of this paper. In the body part of the paper, the writer presents an analytical analysis of the language features of English advertisements at three levels: lexical, syntactic and discourse. In order to acquire sufficient data and draw a scientific conclusion, the writer examined a large amount of advertisements in newspapers and magazines and built a corpus of 120 English advertisements. It is hoped that through the detailed study of the three types of advertisements: daily consumer goods ads, technical product ads and service ads, similarities and differences in advertising language features can be identified and possible reasons will be given according to the meaning, style and function of language. During the process of analyzing, examples, figures and tables will be provided to make the paper easier to understand and more persuasive.The writer hopes that the study can evoke readers' awareness about the features of the words and sentences, and about skills used in English advertisements so that they can have a better understanding of them.