Abstract
This article has studied the language of persuasion in advertising texts and has examined persuasion in some Persian newspapers with an emphasis on the gender variable. This study was conducted by analytical approach and its data was collected from Iran's most important and widely circulated newspapers. The study results suggested that in persuasive texts of newspapers, the advertisers encourage viewers and audiences to buy the products by emphasizing on some characteristics specific to women such as beauty, adornment and housewifery as well as some special characteristics of men such as fitness, social prestige, responsibility and the role of being a provider. The findings indicated that the studied texts had characteristics in such a way that they use specific linguistic components and literary forms such as foregrounding, alliteration, hyperbole and exaggeration, metaphors and ambiguity to convey the desired concepts and attract the audience according to gender. Thus, the gender variable is an effective factor in the structure of persuasive texts related to advertising in Persian newspapers. The results of the research implied the fact that gender differences have been reflected in advertising in the form of language and other specific metalinguistic elements such as ideology and culture, and these linguistic and metalinguistic strategies are employed differently for men and women, in a way that this unequal gender approach seems to be man-centered.
Highlights
Advertising is considered a kind of product supply and demand in the business world in which the supplier of the product tries to persuade the audience to buy and use the product in order to gain profit by presenting the product to the audience
The research is to find out which ideologies or linguistic and metalinguistic strategies the product advertisers use to persuade the audience in newspaper ads, and to discover whether these linguistic and metalinguistic strategies are used differently for men and women or not
This study examined the language of persuasion in newspaper ads based on Hovland model
Summary
Advertising is considered a kind of product supply and demand in the business world in which the supplier of the product tries to persuade the audience to buy and use the product in order to gain profit by presenting the product to the audience. The data were collected from published ads in widely circulated newspapers, including Hamshahri, Iran, JameJam, Keyhan and Khabar Sport The texts in these ads were classified based on male and female audiences, and they were analyzed according to audience persuasion techniques based on Hovland model (1949). For this purpose, all advertisements included in these newspapers were collected in ten days. Vestergaard and Schroder (1985) have analyzed the language of commercial advertising in the press by using the communicative roles of language They have considered the use of directive speech act to be important in persuading the audience to buy the products. Abbas (2008) has studied the methods of persuasion used by Barack Obama in the 2008 president election. Grice (2010) has analyzed the persuasion methods used by three presidents of America in their lectures for children
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