The syntactic features of promotional language in book blurbs

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the syntactic level of promotional language in fiction and academic book blurbs. The overall research objective was to identify salient syntactic features and investigate the similarities and differences in the realization of this text-in-ternal aspect of thriller, romance, and linguistics blurbs in English. The analysis shows that their formulaic language exhibits genre-specific patterns and form-function correlations in its syntactic complexity. In order to provide a positive description of a book, blurb writers regularly employ structural parallelism, ellipsis, complex phrases with multiple modification, phrasal and clausal embedding, coordination, and other means of structural reduction. However, individual instantiations also display systematic variability in text-length values and frequency of salient features, with fiction blurbs mainly replicating the conciseness of spoken language and academic blurbs closely resembling formal written language. We conclude that the generic integrity of these texts involves a degree of controlled flexibility at the syntactic level depending on the book type/genre as the defining variable. Additionally, the research confirms that the study of linguistic profiles of genres is funda- mentally important for the study of language use, both from a theoretical and applied perspective. The increasing ‘generification’ of contemporary language, and particularly English as the global lingua franca, requires the adoption of a multidimensional genre-based framework in investigating the complex linguistic realities of the 21st century