The register of the Indonesian advertisements as displayed in 'Gadis' magazine

Language, according to Wardhaugh (1998:1), is what the members of a particular society speak. The most common thing occurring in society is the varieties of language use. Lim Kiat Boey (1975:115) says that register is varieties of a language distinguished by their uses. Everyone can speak different registers in relation to use in various situations. Goshgarian (1992:166) states that advertising language is a special language that combines words cleverly and methodically for one purpose: separating people from their money. Thus, the register of advertisements is variation of language use in order to cause the consumers to buy products or services. The study under report analyzed the register of the Indonesian advertisements as displayed in Gadis magazine. The writer would like to find out what lexical features and syntactic features are used as the characteristics of the register of the Indonesian advertisements, specifically facial wash product ads as being advertised in the Indonesian teenage magazine Gadis issued from the 23 April up to the 02 May 2002. The writer analyzed the data, which were Cussons Sweet Seventeen, Biore Anti Acne, and Pond's Anti Bacterial Facial Scrub, under the theories of language and language variation, register, and advertising. The research method used in this study was a qualitative study, which used content analysis method to describe the features of the register of the Indonesian advertisements as displayed in magazine. To collect the data, the writer first chose Gadis, Indonesian teenage magazine, as the source of the data to be analyzed. Then, she chose the ads of facial wash products as the data to be analyzed and noted the three ads on a paper as the data collection. To analyze the lexical features of the advertisements, the writer used William Lutz theory in "With These Words I Can Sell You Anything" as staled in Goshgarian book. And, to analyze the syntactic features of. the advertisements, she used Janet Holmes' Sociolinguistics theory in "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics." The findings show that the lexical features used in the register of the advertisements are weasel words, unfinished claims, and scientific doublespeaks. These lexical features appear in the ads to be making a claim just what the consumers want, even when they are making no claim at all. Lutz in Goshgarian (1992:166) says that to sell products, ad writer will take simple words and twist the words so that they appear to promise just what the consumers want. The syntactic features used are syntactic reduction, syntactic inversion, and heavy noun modification. Using syntactic reduction, that is, subject omission may help the advertisers to invite the consumers to identify themselves wnh the image the advertisers provide. And, using syntactic inversion may help the advertisers to focus on the symbol given to the consumers before introducing the product, while using head noun modification may help the advertisers to heavily modify the focal interest of the product being advertised. These lexical features and syntactic features used as the characteristics of the register of the Indonesian advertisements show that advertising uses a special language that combines words cleverly and methodically. Since advertising language is a special language that combines words cleverly and methodically in order to make people to buy products or services, the writer would like to suggest that consumers should be very careful with advertising language. The consumers have to look at what words really mean, and not what the advertiser wants the consumers to think what the words mean. And for other researchers, the writer would like to suggest that they may analyze the registers in real life or everyday situations, such as register of teachers at classroom, of family or personal relationship, and of neighborly chat