A Study on some Phonetic Rhetorical Devices in Advertising Discourse

Abstract

The article aims to investigate several phonetic rhetorical devices in advertising discourse and analyze the linguistic effects these devices bring to advertisements. To achieve this research objective, we employed two main methods of discourse analysis and description to identify and describe the phonetic rhetorical devices, combined with statistical techniques to quantify their frequency. A corpus of 200 advertisements of 12 product groups shown on various media was collected and used for analysis. The research findings indicate that phonetic rhetorical devices are a popular tool in advertisements as the number of advertisements using phonetic rhetoric accounts for a dominant proportion (82%), many advertisements (48.5%) use more than one rhetorical device, among which alliteration is the most common device, followed by rhythm and resonance. Based on the research findings, some implications have been given for advertising designers from a linguistic perspective to contribute to improving the communication effectiveness of advertising.