An Analysis of Structural Choice and Patterns Used in Selected Facebook Advertisements

The study examines the NP and VP syntactic choices and patterns used in social media advertisements, which offer fresh contributions to the field of linguistics into the specific language patterns used on Facebook ads that highlight the different structural patterns and word choice impact on audience persuasion and engagement. As such, the paper provides insights into digital communication and marketing. The framework used in this study is Andrew Radford’s Inflectional Phrase (IP) Model. The study adopted the survey and manual research design method to generate the data from the official Facebook pages of the selected products. The study reveals that the verb phrase is the most dominant phrase type used in Facebook advertisements. It occurs more than any other phrase structure, such as a noun phrase, an adjectival phrase, and a prepositional phrase. Also, the choice of words revealed that informal language is commonly used in Facebook advertisements to create friendliness, connectedness, and intimacy with the target audience.