Syntactic and rhetorical features of product and social advertisement slogans in English

Abstract

Aim: To analyze the language used in product and social advertisements and determine if there are differences in sentence structures and stylistic figures, grounded in the traditions of advertising linguistics and critical discourse analysis.
Methods: A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was employed utilizing stylistics and rhetorical theory. A purposive sample of 44 online slogans in the English language was selected from online articles and represent different companies and organizations based on brand recognition and market popularity.
Results: There were differences on the syntactic and rhetorical level between the product advertisements and social advertisements in our sample. The syntactic analysis showed that the most frequent sentences in the 22 product advertisements were imperatives (n = 8), followed by declaratives (n = 6) and interrogative sentences (n = 1). For the 22 social advertisements, the most frequent sentences were declaratives (n = 11) and imperatives (n = 9). Not all sentences could be categorized as mentioned due to their syntactic composition. The most prevalent rhetorical figures based on sound among the 22 product advertisement slogan samples were rhyme and alliteration (n = 3), while most frequent figure for the 22 social advertisements was anaphora (n = 4). The most prevalent rhetorical figure based on meaning in the 22 product advertisements was metaphor (n = 9), while metaphor and metonymy were equally frequent in the 22 social advertisement slogans (n = 15).
Conclusions: While product advertisements used colloquial language with catchy and memorable slogans, social advertisements adopted a formal style with figurative speech to affect the viewer’s emotions. However, companies and organizations from both categories tended to prefer simple language and sentence structures. These findings offer broader implications for understanding how linguistic choices highlight the ideological divide between commercial persuasion and social advocacy.