A Comparative Analysis Of Persuasive Strategies Between Chinese And American Real Estate Advertisements: A Perspective Of Rhetorical Appeal

With the development of the modern society, advertisements play an increasingly important role in world economy. Advertisements have been deeply penetrated in every corner of people's life by the ways of television, newspaper, internet, magazine, radio and so on. As the rapid development of the real estate industry, real estate advertisements become more and more important. Lots of researchers have studied the real estate advertisements from the perspective of linguistics, culture and translation etc. The present thesis tries to study the real estate advertisements of Chinese and American from Aristotle's three appeals, i.e. ethos, pathos and logos. The author tries to figure out the differences and similarities between Chinese and American real estate advertisement, and finds out the reasons that cause the differences. Theoretically, it sheds light on the research of real estate advertisements from the perspective of Aristotle's three appeals; practically, it makes contribution to the designing of real estate advertisements.In this thesis, real estate advertisements in Beijing and Washington D.C are selected as samples representing Chinese and American real estate advertisements.100 Beijing real estate advertisements and 100 Washington real estate advertisements are collected respectively from two famous and professional recruiting websites:http://beijing.liebiao.com and http://washingtondc.olx.com in the two countries. The author made a detailed analysis of ethos, pathos and logos in both Chinese and American real estate advertisements through qualitative and quantitative analysis.Based on the analysis, it is found that there are both similarities and differences between Chinese and American real estate advertisements. In both Chinese and American real estate advertisements, ethos is used mostly, and then is pathos, the last is logos; and both of them use concrete details in showing good sense and arouse aesthetic sense in pathos. When appeal to ethos, Chinese real estate advertisements use good moral and good will while American real estate advertisements do not often do; Chinese real estate advertisements employ general adjectives words such as"大,很好,便利"and so on to show good sense while American real estate advertisements use concrete words like "marble, hardwood" etc. Meanwhile, Chinese real estate advertisements prefer to describe the surroundings of the house in concrete details while American real estate advertisements focus the house itself. When appeal to pathos, Chinese real estate advertisements employ beautiful scenery to arouse aesthetic sense, and persuade by inspiring fear, pride and sense about family while American real estate advertisements persuade the audience by presenting them in a real scene. When appealing to logos, Chinese real estate advertisements prefer to use inductive reasoning whereas American real estate advertisements tend to utilize deductive reasoning.