Dorsey Hoskins’ father Bryan felt a tingling in his arm. The diagnosis—an inoperable brain tumor. He died six months later, at 33, leaving his wife Dean alone to raise Dorsey and her sister Hattie. Fortunately, Bryan bought life insurance when he got married, and again when his daughters were born. Dean invested the proceeds in her own clothing store, which gives her the flexibility to spend more time with her children.

Are you prepared? Without insurance, your financial plan may be just a savings and investment program that dies when you do. An insurance agent or other financial professional can help you create a plan that will continue to provide for the ones you love.

    By using a dialogue/monologue copy, the advertiser can add the believability that the narrative copy sometimes lacks. The characters portrayed in a print advertisement do the selling in their own words, through a testimonial or quasi-testimonial technique, or through a comic-strip panel. All kinds of ads can use this body copy , if necessary. For example:

    When I want a CD done right, I do it myself. Yeah, this machine rocks. It burns full-size CDs that sound totally like the original. It plays CDs. Records CD to CD at double speed. And records off of just about any source. LPs. Cassettes. The radio. It’s even got a text display. Anyway, now I’ve got my own greatest hits collection. The stuff I want to listen to. I’ve got to admit it’s getting better.

5.  Conclusion

Up to now, we have analyzed language features of ads at three levels. Linguistic similarities analyzed in this paper and shared by all kinds of ads are shown as follows:

Ⅰ. Lexical features

a. One-syllable and simple verbs such as get and make are used.

b. Emotive adjectives are adopted to arouse reader’s interest.

c. Words are carefully chosen to make pun and alliteration.

d. Weasel words, such as help and like, make the use of strongest language possible in advertisements.

Ⅱ. Syntactical features

a. Sentences in advertisements are short. On average, a sentence consists of 11.8 words.

b.  Elliptical sentences are used to spare advertising cost and at the same time improve advertising effectiveness.

c.  Interrogative sentences and imperative sentences are common in advertisements

d.  Present tense prevails in ads to suggest timelessness. And active voice is used to cater to audience’s habit in daily talk.

Ⅲ. Discourse features

    A complete advertisement consists of five parts: Headline, Body Copy, Slogan, Illustration

    and Trade Mark. Body copy is the key part, conveying product or service information.

While summarizing similarities of language features of three kinds of advertisements, we have discussed the differences between these ads on the following dimensions:

First, in order to achieve the highest advertising effectiveness, the advertiser precisely targets the audience by their social status, roles, income, educational background and gender. Therefore advertising language adjusts itself to get close to target audience.

Second, daily consumer goods, technical equipment and service are totally different advertising subjects. For example, some words in technical equipment ads are comprehensible only to those acquainted with that field. Take iMAC PC as an example. All the features of iMAC, plus: 400MHZ, G3 processor, slot-loading DVD drive, 10GB disk storage, dual 400Mbps FireWire ports, and iMovie video editing software. Laymen of computers must feel confused by these dazzling figures and units. However, in order to make the information of a technical product clear, some jargons are necessary. Therefore different kind of ads speak different language.

The study has shown that three kinds of advertisements in the corpus respectively demonstrate their own unique language features.

In daily consumer goods ads, descriptive adjectives tend to convey senses of sight, taste, and touch in the hope of satisfying women's appeal for beauty and comfort. No jargon is used. Headlines of daily consumer goods ads tend to ask question to arouse the interest of audience, especially women's. The body copy seems not so important and essential as that of the advertisement for products requiring high technological information, thus in some cases body copy is omitted in daily consumer goods ads.

In technical equipment ads, descriptive adjectives largely play the role of conveying information. Compound words, particularly compound jargons, are frequently used to exactly introduce a complicated product. Headlines of technical equipment mean to attract readers by transferring the unknown information of a product, so they are often information/news headlines.

In service ads, the use of pronouns, we and you, is statistically significant. You and we almost appear in every advertisement. “we”, as replacement of a certain service, is used in almost 80% the service advertisements. Institutional copy is often used to sell an idea or the merits of the organization or service rather than sales features of a particular product. Often institutional copy is also narrative in because it lends warmth to the organization. Banks, insurance companies, public utilities, and large manufacturing concerns are the most common users of the institutional copy.

In summary, no matter what kind of structure, or content, or words are used in an advertisement, all of them serve the purpose of attracting ads readers, conveying information to them, and urging them to purchase the products or to use the service. That is what an ad for, and that is also the function advertising language performs.

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