Key Adjectives Used in Beauty, Clothing, Food, and Medicine Advertisements
A Comparative Study in the English Advertisement Corpus and the Frown Corpus
2008 Volume 2008 Issue 14 Pages 31-39
Details
2008 Volume 2008 Issue 14 Pages 31-39
The purpose of this study was to find key adjectives used in beauty, clothing, food, and medicine advertisements. The author compared the English Advertisement Corpus, which consists of advertisements from Glamour, Prevention, Elle, and Cosmopolitan, published in the U. S. in 2006, with the Frown Corpus, which consists of general American English in 1992. From the data, keyword lists for each advertising genre were generated. The key adjectives were classified into several semantic categories so that their characteristics in each genre of advertisement could be clarified. It was found that characteristically: (1) for beauty advertisements, adjectives expressing good skin condition, (2) for clothing, adjectives displaying stylishness, (3) for food, adjectives describing health trends and good flavor, and (4) for medicine, adjectives specifying diseases and parts of the body, were used.
