Acceso usuarios
Chiara Colombo
The language of advertising in Italy has been the object of extensive study in the years from 1965 to 1975, when the diffusion of the new television medium drew the attention of the linguists towards the relationship between language and society. As a result of this activity, the key mechanisms of advertising language – on paper and on the TV screen – were established as a fixed set of linguistic phenomena, that has not been questioned or revised since. Changing economic conditions and the advent of a revolutionary medium, i.e. the web, have completely redefined communication and marketing strategies, as well as consumer profiles. On the basis of a lemmatized sample created from the online websites of five major cosmetic brands, the present study outlines the main features of the advertising language on the web, comparing them to “standard advertising language” and establishing a set of inherent dissimilarities, which stem from the peculiarities of the medium and its users.
