Morphological Configuration and Syntagmatic Patterning of Captions of Commercial Brands

Abstract

This paper focuses on analyzing captions written under the commercial brands directly from morphological and syntactic perspectives. Such captions are used to give the main features of the commercial products which are new methods of promoting the products. These captions should be examined linguistically; their linguistic style should be decoded in order to recognize the morphological building of its constituents and the syntactic patterns followed in constructing their structures. Structurally, most of the captions are phrases; while a few others are sentences, but with different syntactic forms. They are short yet persuasive to let the consumer apprehend the features and contents of the product. Framing a caption might require certain word formation processes including compounding, derivation, prefixation and suffixation. The word orders of captions do not go randomly rather they are governed by syntactic rules that make them acceptable grammatically. However, a bundle of captions of distinct products is used to support the approach of analysis which is already aided with images of the products illustrating their trademarks.