Analysis Of Persuasion In Advertisements With Rhetorical Appeals And Identification

Advertising is so prevailing in our life nowadays that it may be the most familiar discourse to us, only next to the daily conversation. Many a linguist has noticed the significance of advertising to us, and has conducted lots of researches on advertisements from their own viewpoints. However, we found that though most of the researches have been done from the perspectives of linguistics, pragmatics, semiotics, stylistics, etc., little effort has been devoted to the study of advertisement persuasion from the prospective of western rhetoric. Therefore, this thesis is intended to provide a relatively new approach to the analysis of advertisements from the perspective of Aristotle's ethos, and pathos and Kenneth Burke's identification theory, on the basis of an analytical study of some devices most frequently used in advertisements.By introducing Aristotle's rhetorical appeals (mainly ethos and pathos) and Kenneth Burke's identification perspective, the present study opens up new possibilities for the study of advertisements and helps people to understand how advertisements persuade their audience by resorting to rhetorical ethos and pathos and identification, and to understand rhetoric—the art of persuasion. The present study also has practical implications for teaching and learning. With the knowledge of rhetorical persuasive strategies based on Aristotle's and Kenneth Burke's theory, teachers can improve their teaching and achieve better teaching effect, and a student can be more convincing in his/her writing and speaking.The present thesis is divided into five chapters. Each chapter deals with a specific topic, and together will they accomplish the task of the work.Chapter I gives a brief statement of the background of this study and the problem that the author found existing in present advertising-relevant researches, makes clear the purpose and research questions of the study, and explains briefly some key terms, and at last the significance of the study is pointed out and the outline of the thesis is drawn out.Chapter II presents a brief review of the contributions and flaws of some previous researches and works on advertising by other scholars from the prospective of linguistics, sociolinguistics, systemic-function, semiotics, stylistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and rhetoric.Chapter III is devoted to the introduction of the Aristotle's rhetorical appeals (mainly ethos and logos in this research) and Burke's identification as the theoretical background for the detailed analysis in chapter IV and then presents the research design of this research.Chapter IV is the most important part of the study. It conducts detailed analysis and discussion of the selected advertisements in light of Aristotle's rhetorical appeals (mainly ethos and pathos here) and Kenneth Burke's identification.Chapter V summarizes the main findings of the work, suggests some implications for teaching and learning, points out the limitations and puts forward some advice to future studies.