Language of the Media in German and English Women's Magazines

Abstract

No doubt that women’s magazine contain advertisements for their target audience. It follows that mainly cosmetics are advertised in them, but medicaments and food are found there as well. Reading the ads arises an interesting question: do they persuade or manipulate us? What kind of tools are used by the copywriter to come to this? Mulken (2005) claims using puns is a good strategy, which makes it interesting. Furthermore mixing languages (Kelly-Holmes, 2005) is also a good possibility to raise the interest of the readers. The most important thing is to bring the product near to recipients, either with puns, different languages or through other ways such as a dialect or slang. In my thesis I am going to analyse ads that appear in German and British women’s magazines and my aim is to compare the linguistic features found in ads’ headlines. However, it would be more interesting to study the whole text that is in the advertisement but this would exceed the given length of the thesis.