Language Styles of Advertising in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine

Abstract

Language has the power to influence people and their behavior in many instances, one of which is in the field of advertising. Language choice is vitally important to provide messages with the intention of influencing people. Visual content and design of an advertisement have a very great influence on the consumer, but it is language that helps people to identify a product and remember it. Magazine advertisements are not simply constructed but they are carefully made with many considerations. One of the considerations is that they have the intention to attract readers to buy any products advertised. Magazines in many instances employ more than one language style to produce a splendid advertisement. Magazines have their own way to manifest their ideas to promote a product. Language styles of advertising in magazines play an important role to attract the reader's attention. The purpose of this study is to identify the language styles of advertising employed in Harper's Bazaar magazine and to explore how the delivery of meaning is set to the readers through the language styles of advertisement employed. This study utilizes qualitative descriptive methods and focuses on the theory of Pop. The data were taken from four issues of Harper's Bazaar Magazine namely: Harper's Bazaar U.S. issue of May 2019, Harper's Bazaar U.S. issue of June 2019, Harper's Bazaar UK issue of January 2019 and Harper's Bazaar UK issue May 2019. The results of this study showed that the advertisements in Harper's Bazaar magazine used four language styles: morphological, syntactical, rhetorical, and slogan style. Among these four, the morphological style was the most used in Harper's Bazaar magazine.