English advertising slogans of automakers: structural-semantic analysis

Abstract

In the article, the authors investigate the syntactic structure and semantics of the lexical units used in advertising slogans of automobiles. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that an advertising text has lately acquired some specific features that mark it out into a separate genre. A slogan which is a short and striking or memorable phrase used in advertising to identify a product or company is of particular interest to language studies because the purposeful choice and combination of linguistic means make a slogan the key element of any advertising campaign. The paper is aimed at finding out what linguistic means are most effective in achieving the goal of attracting attention of a potential buyer. More than two hundred automobile slogans in English have been studied and classified on the basis of their syntactic structure. Quantitative analysis has identified the most frequently used structure – the imperative sentences that serve the purpose of persuading a person to act. Elliptic slogans consisting of an adjective or a noun with an attribute as well as simple sentences are just as popular with the advertisers because they are informative and concise. Semantic analysis of the slogans has revealed the use of the lexical units most appealing to the audience among them the adjectives “exclusive”, “special”, the nouns “luxury”, “perfection”, the verbs “drive”, “enjoy”.