Browsing by Author "Ahiale, Isaac Kwame"

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    Discourse strategies in advertising language: a case of selected radio and newspaper advertisements in Ghana
    (KNUST, 2023-02) Ahiale, Isaac Kwame
    ABSTRACT Newspaper and Radio advertisements still provide an impressive return on investment for businesses. Aware of this, advertisers use language, actions and strategies to create a common ground with their audience. This study examines how advertisers, relying on cultural ideologies, use several discourse strategies of language to persuade their target audience. Classical Conditioning theory, the study primarily discusses how advertisers use both linguistic strategies and elements in the target culture to persuade their audience, with the view to unravelling how meaning is embedded in the advertising texts. Data is collected through general observation of how buyers are influenced by strategies such as persuasions, implicature, honorifics, conversational tone and verbal descriptions (rather than numerical measure/hard data), in advertisements on radio stations including Peace FM, Joy FM, Adom FM, Citi FM and Star FM, and advertisements in newspaper outlets including Daily Graphic and Ghanaian Times. This study reveals among other things that:  Advertisers tend to employ endearment forms and familiar expressions to influence the buying behaviour of their audience.  Linguistic devices such as repetition, apposition, implicature, hedges, honorifics, and conversational tone normally characterize spoken and written advertisements.  Advertisers adapt linguistic features of communication to dominant ideologies in the indigenous culture so as to persuade the target audience.  Many advertising authorities have come to believe that advertising works best when it most closely approximates a dialogue between two human beings.