Parallel Constructions in the Discourse of Advertisements:A Cross-linguistic Study

Parallelism, as a grammatical cohesive device, holds a significant persuasive role in writing advertising slogans. The present study aimed to compare the frequency of the use of parallelism in English and Persian advertisements. It also attempted to compare the frequency of the three types of parallelism (sound, grammatical and semantic parallelism) in advertisements of the two languages. One hundred English and one hundred Persian advertising slogans were randomly gathered from magazines, radio and TV commercials and the grammatical, sound and semantic parallel constructions in both languages were examined based on Cook's (1990) categorization of parallel constructions. Comparing the percentage of the analyzed parallel constructions in the two languages, it was found that the Persian advertisers tended to use parallelism more often than their English counterparts. On the whole, 50% of the analyzed Persian advertisements included parallelism while, in the English ads, 30% of the items were in parallel form. Among the three types of parallelism mentioned, sound parallelism was the most favorable in Persian advertisements, while grammatical parallelism was the most popular in English ads. Neither of the languages employed semantic parallelism in their advertising slogans. Additionally, the researchers found that among the other lexical and grammatical cohesive devices, repetition and ellipsis were commonly used in the examined English advertisements whereas, Persian advertisements chiefly involved ellipsis.

Keywords:

parallel constructions , advertisement , sound parallelism , grammatical parallelism , semantic parallelism