3. Syntactical features

3.1 Similarities

The purpose of all advertising is to familiarize consumers with or remind them of the benefits of particular products in the hope of increasing sales, and the techniques used by advertisers do not vary markedly. An advertisement is often merely glimpsed in passing and so, to be effective, its message must be colorful, legible, understandable and memorable. The rules governing the language of advertising are similar. We have summarized the lexical features of English advertisements. If words are leaves of a tree, and sentences branches; the branches must also possess their similarities.

First, length of a sentence in advertising is usually short. A sentence in daily consumer goods ads has 10.3 words on average; in technical equipment ads, 11.8 words; in service ads, 12.3 words.

Second, as to sentence structure, simple sentences and elliptical sentences are often used in advertisements. Compared with complex sentences, simple sentences are more understandable and forceful. Elliptical sentences are actually incomplete in structure but complete in meaning. The adoption of elliptical sentences can spare more print space, and take less time for readers to finish reading. In addition, a group of sentence fragments may gain special advertising effectiveness. Let us compare the following two advertisements.

    a. Baked. Drenched. Tested to the extreme. A Motorola cellular phone …

b. The Motorola cellular phone are baked and drenched to extreme.

    Obviously, by using elliptical structure, sentence a is far more brief, eye-catching and forceful than sentence b. What’s more, it conveys attitudes that sentence b lacks. Sentence a implies a kind of appreciation for the phone, by splitting the sentence into several fragments and rearranging its word order. Therefore skillful arrangement of elliptical sentences may add color to a sentence.

Third, as to sentence patterns, interrogative sentences and imperative sentences are heavily used in English advertisements. Imperative sentences are short, encouraging and forceful. They are used to arouse audiences’ wants or encourage them to buy something. For instance:

Enter something magical. (Oldsmobile)

Feel the clean all day. (ALMAY)

Bye one. (Honda motor)

…

 In the explanation of the high frequency of the use of interrogative sentences, Linguist G.N. Leech (方薇,1997:77) discusses two main functions of interrogative sentences. Viewing from the angle of psychology, interrogative sentences divided the process of information receiving into two phases by first raising a question and then answering it. Thus it turns the passive receiving into active understanding. From the linguistic angle, interrogative sentences decrease the grammatical difficulty, because they are usually short in advertisements. Take the following interrogative sentence as an example: if it is asked to condense to one sentence, the condensed one will be complex and dull.

    What’s in Woman’s Realm this week? A wonderful beauty offers for you.

→There’s a wonderful beauty offer for you in Women’s Realm this week.

    Fourth, the passive voice is usually avoided because the passive voice gives the audience an indirect and unnatural feeling. In daily communication, passive voice is seldom used; so is in advertisements. Present tense prevails in most advertisements because present tense implies a universal timelessness. On the rare occasions where the past tense and the present perfect tense is used, it stresses the long traditions associated with a product, such as “We’ve taken our whisky in many ways, but always seriously”; or emphasizes its reliability, such as “We’ve solved a long-standing problem,”; or makes an appeal to authority, such as “Eight out of ten owners said their cats preferred it.”

3.2 Differences

    3.2.1 Headline

    The term Headline refers to the sentences in the leading position of the advertisement—the words that will be read first or that are positioned to draw the most attention. Therefore, headlines are usually set in larger type than other portions of the advertisement. Research (Coutland L. Bovee & William F. Arens, 1992:294) has shown that, on average, three to five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. Therefore, if the advertiser hasn’t done some selling in the headline, he has wasted the greatest percent of his money. So it might be suggested that advertisers should not be afraid of long headlines.

    A headline has numerous functions. First of all, the headline must attract attention to the advertisement fast. It should take only a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention. Otherwise, the entire message may be lost. A headline also selects the reader, that is, it tells whether the advertisement’s subject matter interests the reader. The idea is to engage and involve the reader, suggesting a reason to read the rest of the advertisement. Therefore, the headline is the most important in an advertisement.

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