Using Facebook ads, this study examines how advertisers address female audiences in English and Slovene online cosmetic advertisements. The aim of the analysis is to show that advertisers often adopt a personal approach while addressing an audience and this is mainly achieved with the use of informal style (direct address) and other lexico-grammatical elements. Moreover, the objective is also to establish differences between English and Slovene advertising language in terms of frequently used features. The study is based on a manual analysis of a corpus comprising 70 English and 70 Slovene Facebook ads. In the first part, ads advertising cosmetic products are analysed in terms of lexico-grammatical elements (imperatives, second person, disjunctive syntax, non-finite verb forms, possessive determiners, rhetorical questions, multiple modification). The second part focuses on the address in ads that do not advertise beauty products. The findings show that the frequency of direct address in the two languages is similar, but a closer analysis reveals a number of differences in the choice of means for addressing potential consumers. The direct address of female audiences in Slovene cosmetic advertisements is mostly reflected through the use of imperatives, second person singular and rhetorical questions. English cosmetic ads also include imperatives, however, the use of pronoun your and compound adjectives are more common.
|
