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Zusammenfassung

The imperative, seemingly ideally in line with the appellative character of advertisements, has nevertheless not always been used in the history of advertising. This paper investigates the role of the imperative in English, German and Spanish advertisements from an intercultural perspective. Unlike in English, there exists a distinct polite form of address in German and Spanish. This form appears far more often in the German corpus than in the Spanish one. The problem of which form of address to choose for the respective target groups may be avoided by substituting the German or Spanish form with an English imperative (e.g., in slogans) or with an infinitive construction. The latter strategy is only to be found in the German corpus. The imperative has by now become a central element of the language of advertising. A comparison to a German online corpus demonstrates that this ‘imperative’ language usage is even more characteristic of banner advertisements. However, an analysis of the verbs used in the imperative most frequently in all three languages shows that, contrary to expectation, the imperative does not express the sales appeal, but often requests the recipients to discover, i.e., to obtain information about the product advertised.