EXPLORING THE MORPHOLOGICAL AND SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF JAPANESE ADVERTISING SLOGANS: IMPLICATIONS FOR COPYWRITING

Abstract

This study applies mathematical linguistics to explore the morphological and syntactic features of Japanese advertising slogans and their correlation with popularity. The sample data includes 1,000 advertising slogans from the Tokyo Copywriters Yearbook spanning from 2018 to 2021 in twelve genres. Mean dependency distance (MDD) and entropy (ENTR) were used to calculate syntactic diversity, while moving-average morphological richness (MAMR), moving-average mean size of paradigm (MAMSP), and mean word length (MWL) were employed to measure lexical diversity. The findings indicate that the simplest slogans in terms of syntax were of the imperative form, while the most complex were of the volitional form. Exclamatory slogans carried the highest information amount, while volitional slogans had the lowest. The study conducted a correlation analysis between the morphosyntactic features and popularity and found that there was a tendency towards simpler slogans becoming more popular among the Japanese from 2018 to 2021. The article further provides an overview of the syntactic structures in Japanese advertising slogans and the encoding strategies used to improve their efficiency. The results of this study have implications for copywriters who aim to produce effective advertising slogans.