Advertisements And Announcements

A. Brief News Items All the discussed functional properties of newspaper vocabulary are relevant for brief news items, but this substyle has a number of its own features to be considered. The function of brief news items consists in informing the reader and in stating facts without giving comments. The main style-forming features of news items include the following: absence of any individuality of expression and lack of emotional coloring; matter-of-fact and stereotyped forms of expression; special syntactic structures motivated by the need of brevity and compactness of expression:
(a) complex sentences with a developed system of clauses;
(b) constructions with non-finite forms of the verb (infinitive, participle, gerund)
(c) attributive noun groups;
(e) special word order;
(f) absence of strictness in observing “sequence of tenses”.
B. Advertisements and Announcements There are two basic types of advertisements and announcements in modern English newspapers: classified and non-classified (separate). In classified ones various kinds of information are arranged according to subject-matters into sections, each bringing an appropriate name (e.g. BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, IN MEMORIAM, etc.). This classified arrangement has resulted in a number of stereotyped patterns regularly employed in newspaper advertising. The main style-forming features of classified announcements are predetermined by their function of informing the reader. These features include the following: mostly neutral vocabulary with very occasional usage of emotionally colored words or phrases conventionally employed with the only purpose of attracting the reader’s attention; fixed, often elliptical, pattern; telegram-like statements, with articles and punctuation marks omitted. As for separate (non-classified) advertisements and announcements, the variety of language form and subject matter is so great that hardly any essential features common to all may be pointed out. The reader’s