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a. Lexical Features
Lexis means words. Words can make in to phrases, sentence, and clause. In making advertisement, the choice of words or diction is very important. Diction
is a manner of expression in the word or choice of words Michael Agnes Ed, 1999: 400. A word is a smallest free forms found in language. A free form is an
element that can occur in isolation or whose position with respect to neighboring elements is not entirely fixed. A word is also meaning the minimal meaningful
units of language O‟Grady and Dobrovolsky, 1989: 90.
Advertisements need short, clear and memorable words to attract and give impact to the readers. According to McCrimmon 1984: 271-274, good diction is
the choice of words that allows the writers communicate their meaning to their readers. A good choice of words for advertisements can make a memorable thing
to the readers. Words also represent what the speaker want to say. In this study, the choice of word in the bank advertisements in The Economist magazine will be
analyzed. There are five lexical features which will be analyzed; they are proper noun, repetition, synonymy, polysemy and euphemism. Here are the explanations:
i. Proper Noun
Proper nouns are name of specific people Shakespeare, places Milwaukee, countries Australia, months September, days Thursday,
holidays Christmas, magazines Vogue, and so forth. Proper nouns are written with initial capital letters. Quirk and Greenbaum, 1972: 160
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ii. Repetition
Repetition is when the same words are repeated in sentence or clause in whole text. Repetition can be in the beginning, middle or in the end of the
sentence or text. Example: Catch him, snatch him, and make him yours. In this sentence there are three word
s of “him” repeated. Repetition is a feature of the art or skill of effective communication. McLoughlin, 2000: 21
iii. Synonymy
Words which have different sound but have the same or nearly the same meaning are called synonyms. There is no two words ever have exactly the same
meaning. For example in the word sofa and couch refer to the same object and the same meaning but in the different sound Fromkin, 2000: 158.
iv. Polysemy
Polysemy is one word having more than one meaning; it is often exploited consciously in advertising Goodard, 2002: 63. Polysemy allows text producers
the scope to play around with those separate meaning. Example: a. The lamb is running in the field.
b. John ate lamb for breakfast The word lamb in sentence a means the animal, while the word lambs in
sentence b means meat which is ready to eat. Polysemy provides a fruitful perspective for marketing and advertising
research as well as grounded framework for understanding and contextualizing advertising meaning. Connecting advertising to the subjective context of reading,
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consuming and interacting, we gain a more thorough, yet never complete, understanding of how advertising works.
v. Euphemism