Advertising And Argumentation:A Pragma-dialectical Study On English Advertising Discourse

The fundamental objective of advertising discourse is to persuade audiences to purchase the advertised product, so advertising discourse needs demonstrating its affordability from varied perspectives. As consumer behavior is becoming more and more rational, advertisers are expected to not only adopt rhetorical devices in arguments, but also make the arguments reasonable. The current studies on the persuasiveness of advertising discourse focused on figures of speech or discourse strategies. Only few researches investigated the equilibrium of argumentative reasonability and rhetorical efficiency from the perspective of rational argumentation.Given this, under the framework of pragma-dialectical theory, this thesis analyzes the typical dialectical strategies in advertising discourse, taking twenty-two advertisements on English journals as samples. The research results show that:1) In the confrontation stage, the dialectical strategies of belief presupposition and state presupposition are usually applied. The use of the two dialectical strategies helps to achieve the purpose of propagandizing the advertised products, and meets the psychological needs of audiences. 2) In the opening stage, the dialectical strategies of behavior presupposition and metaphor are usually adopted. The use of the former can make starting point easy to be accepted, and the latter can catch audiences’ attention and resonate with the target audiences. 3) In the argumentation stage, the dialectical strategies of appeal to public opinion, appeal to authority, contrast and appeal to fear are usually adopted. Appeal to public opinion mainly caters for audiences’ psychological needs of conformity. Appeal to authority is helpful to strengthen the credibility of information source and enhance the persuasiveness of the argument.Contrast contributes to highlighting the powerful unique selling points, and proper use of the strategy of appeal to fear can reinforce the persuasiveness through changing audiences’ attitude. 4) In the concluding stage, the dialectical strategies of fact presupposition and rhetorical questions are usually used. The use of the two dialectical strategies leaves the impression to audiences that the standpoint is too obvious to be argued. In addition, the former can also make advertiser avoid reproach from competitors.This thesis not only explores the argumentativeness of advertising discourse, but also analyzes the typical dialectical strategies in advertising discourse. It holds that the typical dialectical strategies reflect the advertisers’ choices which are made after they comprehensively consider argumentative reasonability and rhetorical efficiency, and there are some confusing fallacies among the strategies. Furthermore, it proves that pragma-dialectics makes great contributions to the establishment of theoretical foundation and provides feasible research methods for systematical analysis and evaluation of English advertising discourse.