The article devoted to the analysis of advertising texts in terms of both diachrony and synchrony. Advertising texts relating to the texts of the mass media carry out several communicative and pragmatic functions in the modern society. Evolution of this type of text indicates that without advertising the successful activity of producers of goods and services in a market economy is unthinkable. On the extensive empirical material borrowed from the German press, various sub-types of advertising texts are established, a number (...) of both linguistic and non-linguistic means used in modern advertising for the realization of its purposes, including manipulative ones, are revealed. In order to achieve their goal, copywriters tend to appeal to a number of social values. Despite the fact that the main pragmatic purpose of advertising is updated with the help of morphological means, specific syntactic constructions, and lexical units, the non-verbal component plays a significant role in realizing the impact on recipients. Modern advertising occupies one of the leading places in the media, being the most mobile and dynamic texts. Since many linguistic and non-linguistic means are used in them for manipulative purposes, one can in some cases talk about so-called hidden advertising. The analysis showed that the main principle of constructing an advertising text is the tendency to the apparent simplicity of information delivery. However, in reality advertising is built on much more complex principles, which initially assume not to resort to an objective description of the product or service. It is established that the advertising texts are actively studied from the position of a number of modern scientific branches. They are not only medialinguistics and the sociology of mass communication, but also communicative linguistics, theories of discourse, psycho- and sociolinguistics. (shrink)