Author:Faridah Oluwatoyin Lawal
Date: 20/02/2026
Language in its spoken and written forms continues to be the vital means of communicating ideas. It is, however, notable that English language in particular is not always deployed appropriately to convey the meanings intended by the producer. This tendency is especially evident in advertisements appearing in print news media, where meaning is often compressed and multimodally presented. Such weaknesses may negatively affect the interpretive competence and linguistic development of up-and-coming scholars and other users of English. Consequently, this paper analyses selected Children‟s Day advertisements published in The Punch newspaper of 27th May, 2012 from a communicative-semantic and interpretive perspective. The analysis examines ambiguity, contradiction, reference, collocation, sense relations, and sentence structure or mood, alongside the interpretation of accompanying pictograms, in order to show how meaning is constructed, inferred, and sometimes misinterpreted in advertising discourse.
Keywords: Semantic analysis; Advertising language; Print media discourse; English usage in Nigeria; Children‟s Day advertisements
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