The Semantic Roles as Hidden Messages in Advertisement Texts

Advertising has been analyzed by scholars presenting various branches of science: semiotics, stylistics, marketing, and, of course, text linguistics. Unlike other texts, advertisements have a target audience and correspondingly perform specific functions. The aim of any advertisement text is to make the reader/listener of the advertisement potential customers, buyers, or clients. The authors have chosen the object-matter of their research texts advertising cosmetics. The application of the theory of semantic cases or roles proposed by Charles Fillmore with the purpose of specifying their functions, helps visualize the target audience. The analysis of the semantic cases in advertisement texts shows a connection between the type of the semantic case, age group and price category of the cosmetic products. These semantic cases can be considered as signals of addressee-orientation; in our case the addressee are people belonging to different age group.