A Comparison Study of Linguistic Features in English Ads for Men and Women: A Case Study

This article is aims to shed light on providing a better understanding of linguistic features in English advertisements (hereinafter shortened to ads) for men and women using the descriptive, analytic, comparative and statistical methods to process the 92-sample database collected from four well-known magazines for men and  three well-known magazines for women. The research shows interesting empirical results in terms of the lexical and syntactic features in ads for men and women for further study on gender language in advertising.

In terms of the lexis, the authors point out the similarities and diferences in the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in advertisements for men and women, the contents of each type of ads are different depending on the specific characteristics of each gender. Almost all the numbers of adjectives and adverbs of all kinds for women’s is much higher than those in men’s ads as shown in the table 2 below ( 236 vs. 178). The results also reveal that men’s advertisements use verbs to create more direct requests than women’s (56% vs 35%). This is consistent with previous studies that suggested that women often use interrogative sentences (indirect) to request while men use imperative sentences(direct)  to do so.

In term of syntax, in women’s ads, the numbers of sentences and phrases are more than those in men’s ones. According to the survey data, there are 129 phrases and 177 sentences used in women’s ads and those numbers in men’s ads are 108 and 100. This is also true with the average number of words in women’s advertisement compared to men’s advertisement ( 64 vs. 43).  And the numbers of the short texts of ads (less than 50 words) in the women’s and men’s ads groups are19 and 28 . These figures are likely to show the fact that: the advertiser often talks to women with more words than to men.

The findings of this research may yield good suggestions professionally for advertisers/ copywriters and linguistic researchers. Advertisers should pay attention to the similarities as well as differences in gender language when building the content for men and women’s advertisements. Ads should be designed depending on the gender of the target audience to bring the best effect. Also, other linguistic researchers may use the findings of this research for their studies on the relationship beween linguistics and psychology.