Linguistic Markers of Luxury and Prestige in English-Language Advertising: A Corpus-Based Analysis

For the past few decades, research in advertising speech has been carried out with the intention of scrutinizing the components of language at the micro level, determining the attention-grabbing potential of isolated words and expressions in advertisements. While traditional views of linguistics see the discourse of advertising merely as a form of language produced, recent shifts in the discipline have promoted exploration into the language attributes of luxury and prestige in English language advertisements. The study, which is corpus driven, qualitatively explores the current luxury brand advertising rhetoric aimed at extracting linguistic features that symbolize the concepts of luxury and prestige. To understand such interconnection between a language and consumer’s perception, linguistic markers, which serve as signifiers of the concept and meaning in communication, is a key to study in advertising discourse.