A Study of Persuasive Language in Advertisements

The present study addresses the issue of persuasive devices on the levels (syntax, semantic, and phonology) in the advertisements. It identifies the syntactic, semantic, and phonological devices occurred in advertisements. In addition, it sheds light on the different techniques used in the same data and how such techniques help to change a person s or a group s attitude or behavior towards some event, idea, object or other person(s). Ten advertisements that deal with different subjects are chosen from the internet to be the corpus of the study .The paper aims to investigate the most common persuasive linguistic marker and technique used in the data under study. It shows whether the absence of any one of the persuasive linguistic markers or techniques in general affects the advertisement and leads to make it unsuccessful one or the opposite. To fulfill the aims above, it is hypothesized that not all linguistic markers (syntactic, semantic, phonological) and techniques of persuasion are necessarily present in the same advertisement .That is , the advertisement still achieves its role of persuasion in spite of that absence of any persuasive linguistic marker or technique. Moreover, it is hypothesized that persuasive linguistic markers on the syntactic level is more frequent in use than those on the other levels (semantic and phonology). On the basis of the analysis of the selected data, the researcher has found out that each advertisement, no matter what its subject is, has its own persuasive linguistic markers and techniques which may differ from those occurred in another one. So, the presence of these linguistic markers on any level together with any technique used help to achieve the ultimate aim of any advertisement which is the addressee s persuasion. Additionally, the linguistic markers on the syntactic level are more common in use than those on the semantic or phonological one. Furthermore, attention technique is the most frequent one among others as each advertisement is distinguished by using beautiful pictures, colors, bold headings, and so on which play a vital role in attracting the addressee s attention.