On Persuasiveness Of Direct Response Television Advertising Language

As a relatively new type of advertising, direct response television advertising becomes more and more popular in our society. This type of advertising is very special. It urges people to "buy now", so how to persuade the audience to "buy now" is a great challenge for the advertisers. The main aim of this paper is to study how persuasiveness is achieved in direct response television advertising language. More exactly, this paper discusses how advertisers employ different linguistic devices to persuade the potential consumers.The author of this thesis holds that persuasiveness of advertising language can not be achieved without the consideration of consumers' psychology, especially their motives. In this paper, the author studies persuasiveness of advertising language from a pragmatic perspective and establishes a theoretical framework based on Linguistic Adaptation Theory. The key point is that the design of advertising language must adapt to consumers' needs and motives and at the same time adapt to the psychological state of the consumers in the course of persuasion. This kind of adaptation can be realized on different levels: discourse level, lexical level, syntactic level and rhetoric level. Through the analysis of the linguistic features on different levels, we can get a general view about how advertisers adapt the language to the motives of the consumers to reach persuasiveness.