Advertising language and its properties

There has been long interest in the means employed by advertisers to communicate with their audience (Tanaka 1994:15). To stimulate the sale of products or issues advertising may take various forms and use different strategies and techniques, such as audio-visual, sound and light, photographs and drawing, etc. However, its language plays the most significant role. Language is the most important and effective tool of human communication as it serves a virtuous means in persuading and influencing the audience.

The study of advertising texts promoted linguistic research into this issue. The appearance of a codified term ‘langage publicitaire’ was the result of this research. Thus, the language of advertising is marked out as a specific language because of the presence of distinctive features on its semantic, lexical and grammatical levels (Volostnykh 2005:10).

Advertising discourse consists of the verbal component and other extralinguistic components, such as image, sound, etc. The performance of advertising discourse depends on a good combination of these components, though the verbal component is considered to be the most important.

G. Leech claims that language, a tool of communication, has five functions. First, language has the informative function to convey information to people through words, expressions or gestures. Secondly, language has the expressive function to express human feelings, emotions, etc. The directive function enables us to influence the behavior or attitudes of others, such as commands and requests. The aesthetic function is used for the sake of linguistic artifact itself. Finally, language has the phatic function to keep social relationships in good repair (Leech 1974:21). All the functions of language mentioned are highly effective. For example, the informative and expressive functions are used in advertising to transfer the messages about the products or services or social issues, while the directive function influences the attitudes of people and persuades them to purchase the products or to react somehow to an issue stated in the advertisement.

The language of advertising is written for all groups of people and it affects them in different ways. The language of advertising usually varies in order to make people go for the advertised services or to make them think of the ways how to respond to a social problem or issue.

There is a variety of features characterizing advertising language, which could be referred as typical of this register. These features are as follows:

• •    use of emotive and evaluative adjectives or adjectival phrases

  Such words can stimulate dreams and desires by arousing taste, touch, smell and even sounds without misrepresenting a product. Among the adjectives, ‘new’ is likely to be the favourite one. According to the research of choice of words in advertising discourse by G. Leech, the most frequently used 10 words are: new, good/best, free, special, wonderful, fine, easy, bright, real, rich. Among these words, ‘new’ is the most common one, which shows people’s desire for original idea and concept (Leech 1974:132), e.g.:

We would never say the new Audi 100 is the best in its class. We don’t have to.

• •    use of long noun phrases (frequent use of pre- and post-modifiers for descriptions)

• •    extensive use of compounds to transmit as much information as possible to the consumers the shortest time possible, e.g.:

Kodak single-use-cameras take pictures where you wouldn’t normally take your camera.

Mercedes Motion-Blur Illusion.

• •    use of simple and colloquial language to appeal to ordinary people deliberately ambiguous

  • G. Leech lists twenty most common verbs in his ‘English In Advertising: Linguistic study of Advertising in Great Britain’. They are: taste, take, like, use, need, keep, go, buy, have, get, make, give, see, come, know, look, love, feel, choose, start (Leech 1974:136), ( http://inspirationfeed.com/50-creative-effective-advertising-examples/ ) e.g.:

All you need is a taste of adventure.

Let it taste the way it should.

• • extensive use of neologisms that can raise the interest of the receivers, e.g.:

The ultimate all-inclusive one price sunkissed holiday.

Fitvibe: exercise.

These features are applied to advertising texts. The information presented in an advertisement can touch upon different characteristics of goods or people’s feelings, the addressee or its efficiency, while the emotional component is mainly based on the use of connotative lexis, expressively coloured words, polysemantic words and homonyms (Morozova 2001:35).

The structure of advertisements is determined by their aim and tasks referred to. Thus, advertisements may consist of only a few sentences, phrases or even words or can be considerably long. The advertisements are all based on logical nature that is why they must be understood properly in order to be translated in the right way. They may also be formal, precise or vague.

Consequently, the major factor for the advertisement to be successful and to have the power to move to action is its language. For the advertisement to be a true form of persuasion and to affect us all in different ways, it should be understood well in terms of both linguistic and psychological influence.