On Persuasiveness Of Advertising Language

Advertising is becoming more and more important in modern society, and the ultimate function of advertising is to persuade the audience to buy the products advertised. Language plays an important role in performing this function of persuasion. The main goal of this thesis is to discuss how copywriters employ language in advertising to help persuade the audience. "Persuasiveness" of advertising language refers to any language or linguistic devices that can draw the reader's attention to or arouse the interests of the readers for particular goods or services, or even manipulate the social values and attitudes towards certain products.Scholars have studied advertising language from the semiotic approach, the pragmatic approach, and the semantic approach. They have made great contributions in the study of advertising language. But their studies have some demerits. They have not considered the psychology of consumers in their studies and have not realized that buying behavior is more of an emotional one in modern society. Advertisers often appeal to emotions, affection, humor, snobbery and sexual innuendo, etc, to persuade the potential customers.The author of this thesis holds a view that advertising is such a complicated phenomenon that we simply cannot use one theory to explain how persuasion is reached in advertising. So, the author adopts a comprehensive approach with the semantic approach as the main theoretical framework. The basic concept is "association", that is, what the language says must be associated with the needs of the audience. Advertisers can employ language on discourse level, semantic level and pragmatic level to persuade the audience to buy the products. Firstly, Copywriter often uses unique form or letter size (see Section 4.1) to attract the attention of the audience, and attention getting is the first stage of persuasion. Secondly, advertisers often appeal to emotions, affection, snobbery, etc, to persuade the audience (see Section 4.2). An effective means is to explore the vague and indeterminate meanings(associative meanings) of certain key words. It is these vague indeterminate associative meanings that are relevant to the psychological needs of the audience. Thirdly, the combination of modality system and entailment and presupposition is often used in advertising to persuade the audience (see Section 4.3). Fourthly, the language that can arouse rich imaginations of the audience can also help persuade the audience (see Section 4.4).