Text in English / Advertising is a genre of mass media communication which unearths the exceptional qualities of
products and services in a persuasive fashion. It is also a form of marketing communication
through which business organizations inform the general public about new or improved
commercial endeavors. Advertising in modern time comprises varied component parts (visual
imagery, graphic and color designs, print and auditory techniques.); however, language plays an
indispensable role in the transmission of the message. Language has an immense influence on
human beings and the way they behave. The language of advertising influences the reasoning,
thinking, feeling and the general attitude of the audience. Copywriters, like poets, choose their
words carefully in order to achieve a particular rhetorical effect. They use language in such a
way that they attract attention, arouse interest or desire and create need. Language forms an
integral part of advertisements. The current study focused on persuasive elements in the English
employed in advertisements in newspapers in Ghana. The study investigated the extent to which
Aristotle’s three artistic proofs (logos, pathos and ethos), figures of speech and grammatical
elements in the English of advertisements in the Ghanaian newspapers were employed by
copywriters for persuasive effect. The current study was underpinned by three theories, namely,
Aristotle’s Rhetorical Theory, Conventional Figurative Language Theory and the Standard
Theory of Generative Grammar. These theories lent support to the three thematic trends of the
study. The qualitative research design was employed given the interpretive nature of the analysis
of the corpus. The current study did not involve human subjects as data sources because the
corpus was from written documents. The purposive sampling method was employed owing to the
subjective nature of the process of data collection. The qualitative content analysis approach was
adopted as the analytical framework for the study. This made it possible for the coding of
categories of the textual data based on the themes, patterns and trends that emerged. The findings
of the research revealed that copywriters in the Ghanaian newspapers employed Aristotle’s three
artistic proofs, figures of speech and grammatical elements in the English of advertisements for
persuasive effect. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Phil. (Language, Linguistics and Literature)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/25879 |
| Date | 01 1900 |
| Creators | Torto, Richard Torgbor |
| Contributors | Nchindila, Bernard Mwansa |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (xv, 291 leaves), application/pdf |
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