A Study On Changes Of Rhetorical Strategies In Newspaper Advertising: To Take Guangzhou Daily As An Example

To use rhetorical strategies in a right way is one of the critical factors for successful advertisements. However, in China, the researches on advertising rhetoric in the past years mainly focused on taglines with a combination of Rhetoric and Advertising. Such kind of researches can do little help to the practice of adperson; neither does it to the systematization of advertising rhetorical strategies. In consideration of all these deficiencies, this paper tries to put forward a specific taxonomy for rhetorical strategies based on the current status of rhetoric use in newspaper advertising with reference to related researches from outside China, and to examine the transformation of rhetorical strategies in practice from a diachronic perspective in a quantitative method. The research will then be innovative and reliable.The paper firstly uses the results of western advertising rhetoric research to build up a taxonomy close to the consumer psychology; and then conclude a rhetorical strategy framework based on the consumer psychology and the product and media characteristics. The paper carries on content assessment and content analysis to the 568 advertisements sampled from Guangzhou Daily within a period of 11 years from 1996 to 2007 according to the aforementioned taxonomy and framework and attempts to find out the transformation trend of rhetorical strategies in the dimension of time.The paper finds that the rhetorical strategies of newspaper advertisements are becoming more and more complicated. Although the negative rhetorical strategy still exists in some advertisements, it is the anchoring and layering that work as the mainstream strategies among all. More and more adperson incline to use anchoring and layering in their works, which may be due to the improvement of consumers' cognition, the advancement of economy level and the development of science and technology.