A Contrastive Study Of Persuasion In Chinese And American Real Estate Advertising: A Critical Discourse Approach

Real estate advertising constitutes a large proportion of advertising space. This can be contributed to the nature and valuable role of real estate industry it plays in society both domestically and internationally. Unlike those advertising texts that promote services and ideas such as tourism, real estate advertisements need to persuade people into spending their life-time deposit on houses. Real estate developers have been crafting their advertising wording with a hope of persuading consumers to take action as quickly as possible. Thus, advertising in housing property can be treated as an ideal phenomenon to study customers’ consumption ideologies in society. Besides, housing globalization is an irreversible trend. A contrastive research into Chinese and American advertising texts will, to a great degree, offer inspirations in marketing promotion. By taking advantage of the cultural backgrounds and consumers’ ideologies related to housing, real estate marketers are able to produce the culturally right advertising to address consumers’ psychology.This thesis conducts a contrastive study of 50 Chinese and 50 American residential real estate advertisements from a critical discourse analysis perspective. This thesis tries to answer three questions: 1) What are the prominent linguistic features to be identified in Chinese and American real estate advertising in terms of their persuasive strategies? 2) What kinds of ideologies are reflected through different lexicon-grammatical devices in Chinese and American real estate advertising texts? 3) How to evaluate the differences and generalize implications?Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model is adopted as the framework to find out how advertisers increase the persuasiveness of real estate advertising by exploiting ideologies. In Description dimension, interpersonal meaning will be used to analyze the linguistic features. Interpretation is guided by the theory of intertextuality, and finally the embedded ideologies in the two corpora are summarized and the reasons for them are presented.After specific contrastive analysis, this research comes to the following conclusions. Chinese real estate advertisers prefer to use the polite salutation “您” to impress consumers with respects. Also they tend to diversify their mood systems through different linguistic devices. There exist more imperatives and high value modal operators in Chinese advertising texts, because they have the power of inciting consumers to take action. Chinese advertising often uses subtle meanings of characters so as to trigger lexical presuppositions. Advertisers are more inclined to use reference groups because Chinese people are influenced a lot by collectivism. Chinese ideologies, like the deep rooted concept of owning a house as early as possible and the desire for excellent educational resources are the focus of real estate advertising. On the other hand, American real estate advertising adopts a more face-to-face communicative tone through the frequent use of “you”. Besides, it prefers to achieve the interpersonal meaning with the naturally objective declarative clauses. In the interpretation section, it is found that American ads use considerable amount of existential and factive presuppositions, which also proves that they tend to attract consumers with practical information. Unlike Chinese strong complex on houses, American people long for convenient access to health clubs and demand a great degree of privacy.Critical discourse analysis framework judges ideology neutrally. Thus findings in this research are evaluated without bias and they offer inspirations for the marketing promotion in the Chinese or American real estate markets.