A Discourse Analysis Of Car Advertisments In English

Abstract

The language of advertising is a very special one which has its own characteristics that make it different from other languages. This study made an investigation into the car advertisements in English to discover discourse features and in terms of the layout, lexical choices, syntactic features and cohesive devices. The findings of this study were presented based on a survey of 165 advertisements in English which were taken from the well-official websites of car companies such as Ford, Chervolet, Cadillac, Jeep, Holden, Lotus and etc. Thanks to the combinations of qualitative and quantitative approaches, the discourse features of ECAs were analyzed. In terms of layout, the layout of car advertisement was discussed in terms of 2 parts: The headline, the body copy. The lexical choice in the thesis focused on car technical terms, adjective, modal verbs and pronouns. In terms of syntactic features, sentence types in ECAs used are simple sentences with highest percentages, followed by complex sentences, compound-complex sentences and the last is compound sentences. In terms of cohesive devices, reference occupies 42.4% while ellipsis only takes up 35.6% in ECAs and the last item is conjunction which takes up 22%. Based on the findings, the thesis provide some implications and suggestions for teaching and learning to write advertisements in English. It is hoped that the result of the thesis is a useful reference to those who are interested in car advertisements, especially advertisements for car products or manufactures in promoting the trade of their products.