The language of print advertising in the UK has been the subject of extensive research, but until
now there has been no attempt to provide a unified linguistic analysis of both commercial and
non-commercial advertisements. Likewise, there have been no corpus-based investigations of
how the choice of language is conditioned by such non-linguistic parameters as addressee’s
gender (males vs females) or product type (e.g., food, cosmetics, financial services, cars,
personal accessories, etc.). The current paper aims at redressing these omissions. The data for
the study was collected from twenty-four newspapers and magazines published in the UK from
March 2006 to January 2007. The three hundred and sixty-four advertisements were sampled to
allow comparison between commercial advertising subcategorised by various types of goods
and services, and non-commercial advertising represented by charity and government adverts.
Applying the multi-dimensional (MD) approach (Biber 1988), six dimensions of variation in
advertising discourse (e.g., a hard-sell dimension, a narrative dimension, etc.) are identified and
explained. Controlling for the product type, it is shown that cosmetics advertisements targeting
females tend to use elaborate description with a pseudo-scientific focus (e.g., A “Youth Index”
was also proven and confirmed by an exclusive digital imagery technology “Pixel Skin”), while
adverts aimed at males are characterised by a terse description dominated by disjunctive
grammatical structure (e.g., Youthful appearance. Renewed looking, fresh feeling skin). Do
advertisers believe that women are more easily ‘blinded by science’ or does the finding reflect
possible gender-based differences in information processing? These and similar questions will
be asked to analyse the underlying causes of the observed variation.