A Study Of Stylistic Features Of English Advertisements In Magazine-from The Perspective Of Foregrounding

As an effective channel to provide information and promote products,advertisements are favored by advertisers and manufactures. Being one form ofadvertisements, advertisements in magazine refer to the advertisements usingmagazine as communication media. Compared with other media advertisements,advertisements in magazine specialized in highly targeting its readership, enjoyinglong reading duration and high reading rates as well as being attractive. Therefore, theglamour of advertisements in magazine lies not only in promoting effects but also inits refined language style. However, English advertisements in magazine have notgained sufficient and intensive studies yet. Most studies concerns with the languagefeatures of advertisements, leaving more specific language variety advertisements inmagazine untouched.This study attempted to analyze and interpret stylistic features of advertisementsin magazine systematically and comprehensively in the light of foregrounding theoryof functional stylistics.The term “foregrounding”, originated from painting field, means placingstressed people or material in the salient place, while the rest serves as the backgroundto create the outstanding effects. Later, the concept of foregrounding was introducedinto linguistic field, referring to the deviance in language. Functional stylistics holdsthat foregrounding is the motivated prominence. The deviance or prominent featureswill be regarded foregrounding and have stylistic value only if it related to themeaning of the text in a certain context. There are two ways to achieve foregrounding:one is incongruity, which means the intentional departure from the norm of thestandard; the other is deflection, which means the over-regularity using of the norm.Foregrounding is an important device for composer to create striking and persuasiveadvertisements. The incongruity foregrounding mainly appeared in graphological,lexical, syntactic and semantic level, and helped advertisements achieve novelty andeye-catching effect. The deflection foregrounding appeared in phonological, lexicaland syntactic level with the purpose of highlighting the important information. Reader’s attention can be retained on the stressed theme through foregrounded features;thereby the communication effect can be enhanced.This study analyzed the50English advertisements in magazine in the corpus inthe light of foregrounding theory. The detailed analysis was carried out from thephonological, graphological, lexical, and syntactic and semantics levels in terms ofincongruity and deflection, and the stylistic features of advertisements in magazinewere analyzed and the functions it achieved was interpreted. The results of this studywill help readers better understand and appreciate the artistic use of language, and atthe same time help composers better understand how advertisements stand out fromothers so as to create effective advertisements, and further supplement the research onstylistic features of English advertisements in magazine.