The following essay was submitted as part of the course work for MA Applied Language Studies, at the University of Westmisnter, London.

A comparative study of the selected language features in the product promotional ads and the job offering ads

Topic

The current study is a comparative analysis of the language used in advertisements for job and for product promotion. Its aim is to find out whether or not there are any differences between the two types of advertisements. It will look forward to brining out their similarities and differences.

Delimitation

Because of the diverse variety of ads, depending on the media used, it seems quite impossible to consider all modes of advertisements in this short study. Therefore, the present study focuses only on the written newspaper advertisement. A future study might take into account the use of other information resources such as Television, Radio and World Wide Web.

Furthermore, even in the written newspaper ads, some parts of the ads were not counted towards final analysis. These include: small prints like terms and conditions, numbers. Web and email addresses were taken as one word.

In the beginning one may not realize how divers the features of language are and can be, but once an analysis is set to start its complexities and difficulties start to appear. This is the main reason that forced the researcher to delimit the analysis of language features to only these:

- Content words, i.e.,

§ Nouns

§ Verbs

§ Adjectives

§ Adverbs, and

- Complete sentences

Methodology

In order to accomplish this study the writer has randomly selected a total of eight (8) advertisements from various national and local newspapers and magazines [1], four from employment advertisements and the rest from product promotional advertisements. The samples are then analysed and a database is developed based on the usage of aforementioned language features. In order to give equal importance to all advertisements, the number of linguistic items found in them, is determined by their percentage toward the total words used in that particular ads. For example, if an advertisement ‘a’ has got one hundred words in all and there are 12 adjectives, 5 adverbs and only one complete sentence of 9 words in all, their weight in the final analysis will be 12% adjectives, 5% adverbs and 9% sentences. For an advertisement b, which comprises of 300 words, of which 64 are adjectives, 29 adverbs and 45 words are part of sentences, their weight towards the final count will be 21% adjective, 9.6% adverbs and 5% sentences respectively.

Findings and Analysis

After a careful analysis of all the advertisements, the findings were tabulated in the following table. All ads have been given an ID. The prefix ‘P’ suggests that the ad relates to product promotion, whereas the prefix ‘J’ is for job related advertisements. ‘Ps’ is the total of product promotion ads and ‘Js’ is the sum of employment ads. ‘Total’, as name suggests, is the combined total of all the ads. In front of every row heading (like P1, J4, or Ps) there are two rows. The upper one gives the exact amount of language items found in the text and the bottom line Figures in italics are the percent usage of the above presented number towards the total words in the ad(s).

Database Table

To make this complex table comprehensible, please follow charts below. Chart 1 gives the percent usage of all selected language items in all the ads. Whereas Chart 2 deals with content words only— it explains the percent usage of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives in the whole body of content words. ‘Noun 57%’ suggests that among one hundred content words there will be 57 nouns. At this point no distinction is made between job ads and product promotional ads.

Figure 1

Figure 2

A simple look at figure 1 will reveal that main bulk of content words is nouns. They comprise of 34.39 percent of the total corpus. Adjectives come second as they go with nouns. It won’t be very wrong to say that there is some sort of relationship between the number of nouns used and the number of adjectives used. Since an adjective is ‘a word that qualifies or describes a noun or pronoun’[2], its existence is to a large extent bound with the presence of nouns. If there are no nouns in a text (which seems quite impossible) there will be fewer chances of any adjectives. Similarly, as adverbs add up, normally, to the meaning of verbs, adjectives or other adverbs, there existence is also bound with the presence of these. Purely linguistically speaking and keeping aside other factors such as emphasis, the more the number of verbs and adjectives the more will there be chances of having adverbs.

Figure 1 also suggests that in all the ads only less than 30% words are not part of a grammatically complete sentence, and most of the words, i.e., over 71% are part of grammatically complete sentences. Further analysis of two different kinds of advertisements will show that there’s a relationship between the number of content words and sentences. Most non sentence structures are verbless noun phrases such as ‘Sussex Pond Pudding’, ‘Queen’s Surprise’, ‘Cool lustre body moisture’, ‘Burger King’, ‘Research Accounts Assistant’. They don’t make any, or very less, use of structure words. The more the number of structure words the more will there be chances of having complete grammatical structures (as analysis ahead will reveal)

Findings and Analysis of Ps

The ads for product promotions have their own specific features and structures. The charts below along with the analysis will make all these much clear.

Figure 4: 270 Content Word

More than 63% content words in Ps are nouns. Second largest group is that of adjectives that go with nouns. A simple study of these, and not just their definition, will reveal that their existence is to quite a large extent bound with nouns. Have a look at the following examples.

o cinematographic history

o hectic life

o natural, friendly bacteria

o sticky toffee pudding

o programmable fan

The relationship between adjectives and nouns is about 36.9%, i.e. with every100 nouns in Ps there will be around 36.9 adjectives—an adjective with almost every second noun.

The influence of verbs, which are around 8 percent, can be seen by the presence of grammatically complete sentences. There are only 8 complete sentences with all necessary grammatical elements present in the right order between two full stops. An average sentence length is 21.25 words as there are 170 words in sentences. From a total of around 31 verbs, more or less 8 sentences are constructed, as verbs were also used in some other non sentence constructions like imperatives and heading.

Findings and Analysis of Js

Job selling advertisements (Js) come up with their own, more or less, specific style.

The charts below (Figure 5 and 6) explain their usage of language items in general and importance of the relative use of content words.

Figure 6: 316 Content Word

Comparative Analysis of Ps and Js

Figure 7: Comparisons

A careful analysis of Figure 7 will reveal that in terms of quantity (of occurrences of required language items) the data does not behave in a random way; rather there is reason in it. Three of the Ps (Nouns, Adjectives and Adverbs) are dominant, whereas three of the Js are also dominant. Ps make use of more nouns, adjectives and adverbs but less of other functional words, therefore come up with fewer number of complete sentences as compared to Js, which make less use of nouns, more of verbs and structure words. Js use around 20% more structure words thus doubling their number of words in complete sentences. Although average sentence length in both the types of advertisements is pretty much the same-- 21.25 words in Ps and 24 in Js, it is their use of non sentence structures that mainly differentiates them. In one particular ad ‘P3’ there is no complete sentence, only 2.33 verbs but more than 55% nouns. All this leads to the conclusion that there is a significant role of verbs and structure words in complete sentences. This is proven by the data as all ads that employ more verbs and structure words tend to have more instances of grammatically complete sentences. Whereas ads that have more nouns and adjectives and less verbs come up with more instances of verbless noun phrases.

Surprisingly both the types of ads use the same number of adjectives as compared with their usage of nouns. Although Ps use more nouns and adjectives as compared to Js, the relationship between their usage of nouns and adjectives is much the same. For Ps which use 168 nouns and 62 adjectives, their relationship is 36.9%, i.e. with every 100 nouns there will be 36.9 adjectives. For Js, there will be 39 adjectives with every 100 nouns. This not only confirms that the presence of adjectives is heavily dependent on the presence of nouns, but also that, with regards to the relevant usage of nouns and adjectives, both Ps and Js are not much different. Contrary to the widely held view that probably in Ps there will be more adjectives as they tend to emphasize more on the properties, qualities and features of the products sold, it is also true for Js as well, as they emphasize on the qualities they would like to have in the required person[3]. In one type of ads an object or commodity is up for sale and a lot of its qualities are mentioned whereas in the other, a kind of personality or a kind of service is being bought and all its required attributes are given in the form of adjectives. ‘same natural, friendly bacteria’ and ‘positive, proactive and energetic… confident and influential’ are the kinds of adjectives commonly found in such ads.

Similarly there’s a relationship between nouns and verbs as well. With 168 nouns in Ps there are 31 verbs, thus making their percentage as 18.5%, i.e., with every 100 nouns in Ps there will be 18.5 verbs. For Js, with every 100 nouns there will be 34 verbs, thus making verbs much more important. This establishes that in Js, the greater number of complete sentences is also due to this relationship between nouns and verbs. The more the number of verbs as compared to nouns, the more the chances of having complete grammatical sentences.

Findings and Summary

The findings of the study can be summarised as:

- Ps use more nouns and adjectives, hence emphasising more on objects and their qualities,

- Js use more verbs and structure words, hence coming up with more grammatically complete sentences.

- The fact that Js use more sentences and Ps use less is based on

o Ps’ use of more nouns and adjectives and less use of structure words

o Js’ use of more verbs and structure words and less use of nouns and adjectives

- The relationship between noun and adjectives in both the types of ads is pretty much the same, i.e. for a given number of nouns the number of adjectives used will be quite similar in both the types of ads.

Appendix A

(Ads)

a copy of the ads will be uploaded shortly

Bibliography

• 1. Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schroder: The Language of Advertising, Blackwell (1985)

  2. M. Carole Macklin, Les Carlson (ed): Advertising to Children, Sage Publications (1999)

  3. Guy Cook: The discourse of Advertising, Interface (19920

  4. Lectures by Prof. Jack Lonergan in MA ALS Class

[1] All these advertisements can be seen in Appendix A (Ads)

[2] Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation.

[3] MA ALS Class: Lecture by Prof Jack Lonergan