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Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Volume 16. Number 4, December 2025 Pp. 196-209
Institute of Mediamatics and Cultural Heritage
University of Žilina, Slovakia
The present study explores the use, frequency, and communicative impact of positively connoted evaluative adjectives in the contemporary English advertising language. The theoretical framework is grounded in the works of Goddard et al. (2016), Hall (2002), Ke & Wang (2013), and Rigby & Lee (2024). Empirically, the study draws on a custom-built corpus titled Language of Advertising and developed using the Corpus Architect function of the Sketch Engine software and a seed word methodology. Eight seed words – brand, campaign, offer, discount, newsletter, launch, product, and marketing – have been identified and selected for their frequency, positive connotation, and prominence in existing advertising texts and manuals. The corpus serves as the primary research source, providing linguistic data that are extracted and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, enabling comparison and supporting inferences and conclusions. The findings offer insights into the strategic use of evaluative adjectives in the advertising sector and have potential applications in English for Media Purposes (EMP) as well as in the theory and practice of applied linguistics and the broader field of marketing communication.
Leláková, E., & Kupčíková, N. (2025).Evaluative Adjectives with Positive Connotations in Modern English Advertising Language. Arab World English Journal, 16(4):196-209.
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Dr. Eva Leláková works as a senior lecturer at the Institute of Mediamatics and Cultural Heritage, University of Žilina, Slovakia. In her research she focuses on the comparative analyses of specific lexico-semantic fields, syntactic structures of literary texts, corpus linguistics and application of the results of the matrix theory in the teaching theory and practice.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5294-2505
Bc. Nora Kupčíková is a bachelor’s graduate of the study programme Teaching English Language and Literature and Citizenship Education at the University of Žilina, Slovakia. Her areas of research include general and corpus linguistics.
ORCID ID https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7524-4205