American advertising English : a pragmatic and linguistic study

The analysis of advertising English reveals the function of language in the communicative process and shows how language can be used as a means of manipulation. Only an explicit formulation of how the advertiser uses language, and a reflection about its effect, can protect the individual from being manipulated through language and make him less susceptible to the appeals that advertising has.It is the purpose of this paper to analyse a selected group of advertisements from magazines published currently in the United States in order to determine how language and other persuasive devices operate in those dimensions of advertisements which are set up by the model of communication. While in the first three chapters advertising in general is stressed with respect to linguistic and non-linguistic means, the fourth chapter on the aesthetic function describes explicitly the morphological and syntactical levels of the linguistic means involved. A purely morphological and syntactical analysis is not possible, as there is no clear-cut distinction between these levels and the semantic dimension.Thesis (M.A.