Abstract:With the development of the modern society, advertisement has already permeated into every corner of our lives, and has become an indispensable element in our everyday life. Public service advertisement is one kind of advertisements. It provides service for public service and interest. It aims to inform the public of those important social issues and problems, to attract people’s attention and stimulate their positive action to take part in the campaign to solve these significant issues. Along with the development and maturity of advertisement, researchers at home and abroad have attached great importance to the studies of advertisements style. Accordingly, various studies on advertisements text, especially the linguistic features, have been evoked both in the foreign countries and in China.
The advertisements are taken from an influential organization—the American Red Cross. After detailed analysis, the lexical features of its language can be concluded as the very frequent application of the simple words, interrogative words, modal words, first-person and second-person personal pronouns and compound words. It is hoped that the findings will provide insights into the lexical features of public service advertisement and help the advertisers or students in China to study or create better advertisements.
Key Words: English advertisement; American Red Cross; Lexical features
摘要:随着现代社会的发展，广告已经无孔不入，成为我们日常生活中不可分割的一部分。公益广告,概括地说,是指为社会公众服务的非盈利性的广告，是指为了促进公共利益，唤起人们对社会各种现实问题的关心，呼吁人们以实际行动来解决或改善这些问题。随着广告语体的发展与成熟，广告语篇分析受到了国内外学者的重视，而这在国内外也引发了一系列关于广告语言策略方面的研究。
本文收集了美国红十字会的九则广告语，在词汇特点方面进行了详细的分析并总结出其广告语具有以下特点：用词简单，适当使用可能性情态动词，疑问词频现，多用第一、第二人称代词，灵活运用复合词。本文希望这一发现可以帮助我们对公益广告语的词汇特点有进一步的了解，以便日后进一步学习或创造更好的公益广告。
关键词：英语广告；美国红十字会；词汇特色
With the rapid development of the society, many social problems need to be solved with the efforts of the government, the individual as well as the community groups. In order to realize this purpose, public service advertisement is a good way to build the relationship between the advertiser and the audience and it aims to attract the audience’s attention on these social issues and by means of impressive words to persuade them to take part in the campaign to solve these social problems. Since there are few studies on the lexical features of public service advertisement, this thesis will fill this gap. In this thesis, the lexical features are studied to show how persuasion is realized in public service advertisement. After a detailed discussion, the lexical features of its advertising language can be concluded as follows: the applications of simple words, interrogative words, modal words, first-person personal pronouns and second-person pronouns and compound words.
