A Study Of Rhetorical Devices In English Advertising In Light Of Aristotle’s Rhetorical Theory

As a kind of mass medium, advertising is designed to transmit commercial information and publicize social values and concepts. It not only plays an important role in commercial area, such as the publicity of company culture and the marketing of products and services, but also serves as a helpful way of cultivating excellent social atmosphere. As a significant carrier of information and the soul of an advertisement, advertising language decides whether an advertisement is successful or not. In order to obtain satisfactory effect of publicity and make advertising accepted by the audience, it is a must to enhance the novelty and aesthetic value of advertising language so as to improve the advertising’s attraction and persuasion. Rhetorical devices are often used in advertising language as a kind of language beautifier and make advertising more persuasive.Advertising language is a special linguistic phenomenon, and the previous studies on it involve many academic areas, such as pragmatics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis,aesthetics and so on. This thesis aims to analyze the rhetorical devices in advertising language from the perspective of rhetoric and explore the effects they produce in English advertising. Western rhetoric originates from oratory and is a relatively traditional and time-honored discipline with a history of more than2000years. Its major representative is Aristotle. The core of rhetoric is persuasion and the theory of western rhetoric is still of significance for the study of advertising language in modern times, because the essence of advertising is also persuasion. The previous study only confines itself to one academic area, such as pragmatics, but this thesis studies the rhetorical devices and their effects in English advertising under the theoretical framework of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory and based on the combined knowledge of aesthetics and linguistics.Aristotle is a philosopher, educator and rhetorician of ancient Greece and his masterpiece Rhetoric lays a theoretical foundation for the development of rhetoric. In fact, his successors only refined his theory and did not change the fundamental concepts and principles. Therefore, Aristotle’s rhetorical theory is still meaningful and important for today’s research. The most important part of his theory is his persuasive mechanism which consists of three modes of persuasion, namely, ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos is to make the character of a speaker trustworthy, and pathos is to make the audience in a frame of mind and agitate their emotions so as to achieve persuasion. While, logos refers to the reasonable speech which persuades the audience with reasonable evidence. To achieve ethos, pathos and logos, a speaker must polish and ornate his language to make his or her word trustworthy. Aristotle explores the features on style and holds that style is concerned with diction, organization of phrases, language clarity and beauty and so on. And rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, pun, parallelism and hyperbole, are important language devices which can improve language persuasiveness.In this thesis, the author studies the frequently used rhetorical devices in advertising language in light of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory. The rhetorical devices in English advertising are divided into three categories:semantic devices, such as simile, metaphor, parody and personification, phonetic devices, such as alliteration, onomatopoeia and consonance, and syntactic devices, such as repetition, parallelism and antithesis.The aesthetic effects of the devices are also explored. Excellent language is a good method to improve persuasion and this thesis tries to analyze the effects of rhetorical devices exerting on the achievement of the three modes of persuasion.Through the elaborated research, the author gets the following results. Aristotle’s rhetorical theory is feasible to the study of rhetorical devices in advertising language, because English advertising pursues persuasion in terms of essence; as a kind of linguistic embellishment, rhetorical devices can bring aesthetic effects of rhythm, connotation and structural form to advertising language; the employment of rhetorical devices can smoothly achieve appeals to ethos, pathos and logos so as to persuade the audience successfully. There are some limitations in this thesis and further studies are required. But studies in this thesis can offer some useful suggestions to the future researches in this field.