Register analysis of indonesian advertisements

Abstract

The spread of globalization and marketing during the last century triggered the proliferation of advertising genres. The language of advertisement is unique and very persuasive. The goal of advertisements is to persuade consumers to act and think in a textually determined way in order to boost sales of particular commodities and services. In order to capture attention, convey the message and persuade the consumer, advertising texts use a range of manipulative language devices. This study aims at investigating the register of Indonesian advertisements. A register is a variety associated with a particular situation of use. The description of a register covers three major components: the situational context, the linguistic features, and the functional relationships between the first two components. The linguistic features cover the word choice such as the use of noun, pronoun, active, and passive voice, the use of prefix and suffix as well. Register analysis of Indonesian advertising text is still limited and very interesting to analyze. The data were taken from some advertisements, which were published on different mass media such as newspaper, radio, and television. The data were collected through observation and note-taking method. The theory of register from Biber and Conrad (2009) was used to analyze the register of the advertisements. In addition, the theory of corpus linguistics by O’Keeffe (2010) was also used to support the analysis. Results are presented through formal and informal methods. The results show that those advertisements have high register since most of them used formal linguistic features