A Socio-Pragmatic Study of the Effect of Gender on the Use of Persuasion in Media Language
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Date
2021-08-21
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Abstract
Promoting products and services to society is achieved through ads. They
inhabit a significant position where the written text has developed from a simple
technique into attracting and influencing peopleās decisions and choices upon the
targeted commodity in question to make a purchase. The problem of the study is that
persuasive communication in ads is different from other language practices as it is
related to the speaker-hearer interactions. Thus, the present study presents a socio pragmatic analysis to some selected English TV commercial ads.
This study aims at identifying the persuasive appeals, devices and the types of
speech acts which are used in male and female English TV commercial ads. Also, to
discover the differences and similarities between the two genders in regards to
commercial advertising as a means of persuasion. Therefore, it is hypothesized that
the representative and directive speech acts are of high usage in the creation of
commercial ads and advertisers depend on ellipsis and hyperbole as persuasive
devices. Furthermore, female English TV commercial ads use the trope of hyperbole
more significantly than male commercial ads and the logical appeal is the most
commonly occurring appeal in both genders.
The procedures adopted to achieve the aims and to validate the hypotheses
include conducting a thorough theoretical background on Persuasion, collecting the
selected TV commercial ads from various Youtube channels and converting the
audio-visual ads into text. Then using the developed model for analyzing the process
of persuasion in terms of persuasive devices, persuasive appeals and speech acts.
Also, analyzing the selected ads qualitatively. This is done by identifying the types of
speech acts, the persuasive appeals and devices used for the persuasive process to
occur. Finally, conducting a comparison between male and female use of the
persuasive devices, appeals and speech acts in TV commercial ads.
The present study is limited to analyzing a sum of one hundred English TV
commercial ads, fifty males and fifty females which are randomly selected from
various channels on Youtube and of different advertising companies and
organizations. According to the data analysis conducted, some conclusions have been
arrived at as a result of the data collection and analysis. They have been presented in
chapter five