ABSTRACT:
Ads are efficient argumentative texts because their pragmatic meaning is doubled by a symbolic meaning. Advertising discourses are subtle mixtures of communication, information and creativity. In their discourses ads try to remodel objects, giving them a new, symbolic meaning. Language in advertisements is exploited at maximum: it is used both for communication and persuasion. Ads create a world of desires and lure consumers into it. Creativity in advertising manifests itself mainly in language play. Puns usually exploit the ambiguity potential of homonymy and polysemy. Rhyme, word coinage, syntactic parallelism and alliteration create the dream-world of advertisements. Unusual word-order, incorrect or deformed spelling and word coinage show the importance of the interplay between text and image. Thus the true persuasive effect in ads is achieved through linguistic and pragmatic "play".
