
Full text loading...
From general advertising tasks and strategies three hypotheses about connectivity in advertisement texts were derived:1. In advertisements the number of connectors will be comparatively high.2. The number of subordinating connectors, however, will be low.3. Connectors which semantically possess an argumentative or rhetoric quality will play a dominant role.These hypotheses were tested in a comparative study of written advertising language and other kinds of written texts. Hypothesis 1 and 2 were supported. In testing the third hypothesis it was found that the connectors of addition and of causation are more frequent in advertising than in other written language, but that adversatives are not.In a qualitative analysis the role of causal relationships was worked out. It was found that their functions fitted the tasks of advertising texts from which the hypotheses originated very well. At least five functions have been found:1. Causal connectors often relate two different product qualities to each other.2. They do this by putting these qualities in an argumentative structure of the following form:Product quality (P) conclusion> General positive quality (C)or: Ρ explanation3. When the generalizing difference between (P) and (C) is not very strong, the structure becomes one of tautological repetition. In this way a product quality may be accentuated.