Advertising language: a sociolinguistic study on Turkish advertising discourse as a communication form

With today's developing technology, a lifestyle that is intertwined with mass media has begun to emerge at both individual and social level. We are exposed to advertising messages in various ways through magazines, internet, television, radio and similar devices. The messages given through advertisements are taking its roots from a cultural background and contain examples of various forms of persuasion strategies. In this respect, advertising messages are carriers of both linguistic and cultural elements. As a discourse carrier, advertising messages take into account sociolinguistic variables while conveying the communicative message. In other words, parameters such as addresser, addressee, place, context, the instruments used for sending the message are taken into consideration. Within these criteriathe gender of the speaker and the addressee, understanding the context, are among the factors that play a role in the successful transmission of the message. From this point of view, this study is in an effort to investigate how the meaning behind advertising messages performs if it is handled from a gender-oriented framework. In addition, how the linguistic strategies used in the process of persuading the addressee, which is the main purpose of the advertisement, are shaped within the context of gender are discussed comparatively. Advertising texts, by their nature, contain a lot of short, striking and slogan-style written expressions and support these expressions with various visuals in an attractive, interesting and persuasive style. Written texts in advertisements constitute the study material. Linguistic features in these texts were evaluated comparatively in semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological contexts, and the data obtained as a result of this evaluation were examined through sociolinguistic features. Purposive sampling method was used in the study and research data were collected from female (Elle) and male (Esqire) journals published simultaneously in Turkey between 2015 and 2020. As a result of the study, it is seen that both the characteristics of the advertising language and the female language characteristics determined in the study of Lakoff converge. In this context, it has been seen that the language features used in women's magazines generally support Lakoff's women's language features. On the other hand, it has been determined that the usage in men's magazines confirms these features at some points. Key words: Advertising, Communication, Women, Gender, Journal, Sociolinguistics.