The Language of Advertising: Analysis of English and Lithuanian Advertising Texts
The Language of Advertising: Analysis of English and Lithuanian Advertising Texts

Summary/Abstract: The spread of globalization and marketing during the last century triggered the proliferation of advertising genres. The goal of advertisements is to persuade consumers to act or think in a textually determined way in order to boost sales of particular commodities and services. In order to capture attention, convey the message and persuade the consumer, advertising texts use a range of manipulative language devices. Moreover, different cultures may have different expectations with regard to stylistic choices, language use and other preferences in the same genre. Hence the aim of the article is to analyze the language of advertising in English and Lithuanian in order to estimate the specificities of the advertising genre in the two different cultural and linguistic systems. The approach employed in the study draws on the ideas of the functionalist interpretation of text typology and source text analysis as proposed by Nord (1997) and Reiss (2000). The functionalist approach provides an in-depth understanding of the source and target text conventions and functions which are prerequisites for successful intercultural communication and translation. The means to accomplish the task of the present article is the analysis of a comparable corpus of data consisting of 100 English and 100 Lithuanian advertising texts. For the analysis, only the textual part of advertisements is considered; it is viewed as one of the most important elements of the overall advertising message. The corpus is analyzed through the parameters of linguistic devices, syntactic features and language-use in English and Lithuanian advertising texts.

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