The third chapter starts from the theories in syntax, lexicology, rhetoric and ends with the linguistic features analyzed in the field of discourse analysis.
The fourth chapter combines the viewpoints from the previous chapter third and explores the effect of the advertising English as a whole advertising process. The last chapter, also the conclusion part, shows that though advertising language appears to be flowery and refined, its content is no better than commonest language could convey. By exposing the various techniques advertisers have employed in their writing, this part hopes to remind consumers that advertising English is gradually attaining the negative and ambiguous role in guiding people to buy.
Keywords: Advertising, Advertising English, Linguistic Features
Chapter 1 Introduction
No other statement could have summed up the charm of advertisement than what Aldous Huxley has commented. As he has said advertisement as a literary form is the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, and the most pregnant in curious possibilities. In his comment he asserted advertisement is a literary form and the copywriting process is the delightful and salubrious exercise for the mind. But all in all, what is advertising, and what makes it unique?
1.1 History of Advertisement
Advertisement emerged from the womb of commodity production and exchange. The condition for the existence of advertising is “at least a segment of the population must live above the subsistence level”. When this situation occurs it also becomes necessary for “the producers of materially ‘unnecessary’ goods to do something to make people want to acquire their commodities.” (Vestergaard and Schroder 4)
The embryonic form of advertising in the world is street cries, which exist even today. Advertising was not unknown in ancient Greece and Rome, but advertising as we recognize it did not start until the seventeenth century in the West. It was at about this time that newspaper began to circulate. Before that, it is printing which was first invented in China and then introduced to the West that played a vital role in the production of print advertising. “Classified” (small ads) types of advertising were dominant before the nineteenth century and style and language used in ads at that time tended to be direct and informative. The industrial Revolution, which began in England in the mid-1700s and reached the United States by the early 1800s, facilitated mass-production of goods. Meanwhile advertising became more and more important in the industrial market. The great breakthrough for advertising came only in the late nineteenth century. Technology and mass-production techniques were then sufficiently developed for more firms to be able to turn out products of roughly the same quality and at roughly the same price. This brought on a crisis of over-production and under consumption which meant that the market needed to be stimulated by advertising. At this time advertising changed its function from proclamation to persuasion. In the twentieth century, advertising developed rapidly alongside the advent of new media-radio and television in succession.
