2.1.1 Definition and Goal
Advertising is the paid, impersonal communication of information about products or ideas by an identified sponsor through mass media in an effort to persuade or influence behavior. Not all advertising is alike. Advertisements differ depending on who the message is intended for, where the advertisement is shown, which media are used, and what the advertiser wants to accomplish.(see Table 2.1)
Table 2.1
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Advertising can be classified in four ways: by target, geographic area, media used, and purpose. | |||
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By Target |
By Geographic Area |
By Media Used |
By Purpose |
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Audience Consumer Business: Industrial Trade Professional Agriculture |
International National Regional Local |
Print: Newspaper Magazine Electronic: Radio Television Internet Out-of-home: Outdoor Transit Direct mail Directories Other media |
Productive or nonproductive Commercial or noncommercial Primary demand or selective demand Direct action or indirect action |
Here is the advertising pyramid.
2.1.2 Elements of an Advertisement
As one will see, any advertisement is made up of several elements. Most advertisements used all of them. They include the headline or display line; the illustration; the body copy or text; the theme line or slogan, trade character, seal, and other marks; and the logotype or signature. Each will be considered in some detail below.
(1)Headlines
The headline or display line appears in most advertisements for several reasons. First, it is an attention-getting device; secondly, it also selects an audience by appealing to a specific group, as this line dose: Arthritics reduce painful inflammation and get stomach upset protection. (An ad for medicine) Finally, it is the key factor in getting people to read the body copy.
(2)Illustration
In addition to headlines, most advertisements contain illustrations. The illustration like the headline, attracts attention, selects the audience, and stimulates interest in body copy. What is more, the illustration can be invaluable in showing the product or product use and explaining graphically certain ideas or situations that are cumbersome to put into words. The old saying that one picture is worth a thousand words has much merit in it.
(3) Body Copy
To begin with, some explanation of the word copy is necessary. The job of body copy is to stimulate interest in the product or service or idea being advertised, creates desire for it, and urge action. This is a big task and calls for right words. Although headlines and illustrations clear the way, it is body copy that must carry the burden of the selling job.
(4)Theme lines, slogan, trade characters, seal and other marks
A number of different marks and devices may appear in an advertisement, including theme lines, trade characters, and seals; For example, General Foods uses the corporate identity symbol in all its advertisements. The automatic use of these elements in the advertisement, however, does not diminish their importance.
2.2 Stylistics
2.2.1 The Need for Stylistics
When talking about the English language, one should not be misled into thinking that the label should in some way refer to a readily identifiable object in reality, which he can isolate and examine in a classroom as a test-tube mixture, a piece of rock or a poem. The label of the English language is in fact a complex of many different ‘varieties’ of language in use in all kinds of situations in many parts of the world. Naturally, all these varieties have much more in common than differentiates them－they are all clearly varieties of one language, English. But at the same time, each variety is definably distinct from all the others.
As an educated speaker of English, a student of English is, in a sense, multilingual: for in the course of developing his command of language, he has encountered a large number of varieties, and to certain extent, has learned now to use them. A particular social situation makes him respond with an appropriate variety of language, the language of conversation, the language of newspaper reporting, the language of advertising and so on. But what is stylistics?
2.2.2 Definition
In the past, men have been intrigued with style and many students of human communication have offered their ideas about it. Some are concerned with clarity－or lucidity, as Aristotle called it. For this ancient Greek critic, it was important that the speaker or writer not only has ideas but that he says them ‘in the right way’, a way an audience can understand clearly. He also said that style should be neither above nor below the dignity of the subject but must be ‘appropriate’. Another student of language and human use of it, the Scottish writer George Campbell, also believed words (the author’s diction or word choice) were the foundation of style. He believed the best style comes from diction that the listener notices so little that he is barely ‘conscious that it is through this medium diction he sees into the speaker’s thoughts’ (The sense of style by Geoffrey N. Leech). But unfortunately, they do not clarify matters greatly, at least four commonly occurring senses of the term style need to be distinguished.
Style may refer to some or all of the language habits of one person-as when people talk of Shakespeare’s style (or styles), or the style of James Joyce. More often, it refers to a selection of language habits, shared by a group of people at one time, or over a period of time, as when we talk about the style of the Augustan poets, the style of Old English ‘heroic’ poetry, the style in which civil services forms are written, or styles of public-speaking.
Style is given a more restricted meaning when it is used in an evaluative sense, referring to the effectiveness of a mode of expression. This is implied by such popular definitions of style as ‘saying the right thing in the most effective way’ or as ‘good manners’. (Investing English style by David Crystal & Derek Davy)
Partly overlapping with the three senses just outlined is the wide spread use of the word style to refer solely to literary language. Style has long been associated primarily or exclusively with literature, as a characterized ‘good’, ‘effective’, or ‘beautiful’ writing.
Of the above four senses, the first and second come nearest to what is meant by style. As a starting-point, the aim of stylistics is to analyze language habits with the main purpose of identifying from the general mass of linguistic features common to English as used on every conceivable occasion. Those features which are restricted to certain kinds of social context are to explain, where possible, why such features have been used, as opposed to other alternatives, and to classify these features into categories based upon a view of their function in the social context.
广告英语中的模糊现象分析
广告英语的修辞特征与翻译