Pragmalinguistic Peculiarities of English Slogan in Fashion Domain/Chapter 3. Genre peculiarities of advertising text

It is possible to think of adverts as belonging to different categories or GENRES. These genres have different purposes, they use different techniques and offer different gratifications to their audiences. That is, they are constructed according to different rules or convention. Advertisement has all the features of the text, including the genre features. The general theory of genres considers the text, which belongs to advertisement, as historically formed unity with similar structural and compositional characteristics.

Advertisement as evaluative text
It is known that genres can be identified differently. One of the most popular ways to identify the genre is to use the particular genre schema, which means to find the elements, which are characteristic for the particular discourse of the genre. Due to the language of newspapers and magazines, which use different ways of address (advertisement, life story, doctor’s advice, poster, price list,) advertisement was defined as evaluative text (discourse.) Judith Williamson states that evaluative discourse can be regarded as a form of discourse, as the means of communication" that belongs to the "evaluative genre" which includes such genres as diary entries, letters, reviews, comments, advertising texts, notes, etc. "

Advertisment: Palette of Genres
V. Uchenova, S. Shomova, T. Greenberg in their book "Advertisement: Palette of Genres" (Ученова В.В. "Реклама: палитра жанров"), which is dedicated to advertising activity, present the genres of advertisement and genre division of printed advertisement, radio and TV advertisement, and main types of outdoor advertisement. The authors note that "functional peculiarities of advertisement genres can be explained by the target audience orientation which means to push the recipient to the needed action, i.e. to buy, to vote for a particular candidate, to choose particular play, to participate in charity event. The leading role of pragmatic imperative in advertising activity causes the usage of journalistic genres such as advertorial, charity advertisement, and informative advertisement.

Advetorial
An advertisement in the form of editorial content is called advetorial. The term "advertorial" is a blend of the words "advertisement" and "editorial." Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. Advertorials depend heavily on text. They are designed to create the impression of informed opinion and authority. They often rely on expert opinion. The language in them often uses jargon or technical language. Political advertising might also be considered as part of this genre. More about advertorial here.

Charity advertisement
Generally speaking, all advertisements strive to create a response in the audience - whether it is to buy something, to think differently about a product, to remember the name of a product or company or whatever. Charity ads depend on a an immediate response more than most - usually, what they want to do is to get the audience to donate money. This is a very, very difficult thing to do, and because of this, charity ads often strive to be original, engaging, striking, shocking - basically, to be notable and memorable in some way. Charity ads often try to create a narrative; they tend to focus on one individual in order to create empathy between the audience and the subject. Imperative verbs (orders, like 'GIve' or 'Call') are common, as are signifiers of immediacy ('Call NOW'), for obvious reasons. They often contain necessary factual information (addresses, email details or phone numbers for example.) Thus, we will often find a mix of persuasive and informative writing and imagery.

Informative advertisement
Obviously, informative advertisements are similar to other genres such as the charity ad and the advertorial. They are not quite the same, however. They might try to get the audience to 'do' something - call a helpline, for example - but their chief purpose is usually to educate or to change ideas. As with charity ads, this is a profoundly difficult thing to do, so these ads can sometimes use very engaging or even shocking images. On the other hand, since they often strive to educate, they can also be heavily text-based.

Extralinguistic peculiarities of advertising text
The specific language of the text of advertising is determined by extralinguistic factors such as payment for the billboard rent, the presence of other ads, pragmatic orientation of the advertising text, oversaturation of the information sphere, high advertising rates and the time a consumer is ready to spend on your advertisement, which is owned by the consumer. So print (trade) advertising is semantic and structural unity, which contains the author's attitude to what is stated in the advertisement, anthropocentrism, subject correlation and consistency. At the same time the promotional text combines linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, which create a positive pragmatic orientation - make the target audience interested in the promoted product or service.