The Critical Discourse Analysis in the Persuasive Language of Hotel and Fast-Food Restaurant Advertisements

Abstract

This research study attempts to analyze persuasive techniques in the hotel and fast-food restaurant advertisements in terms of critical discourse analysis techniques. Research on persuasiveness has been popular for a long time, studied as the art of speaking and features of rhetoric. Linguists have never stopped in their quest to find out what linguistic elements create persuasive effects and impact human brains to convince people about something. The research aimed to reveal what techniques were widely used in advertisements to catch customers’ attention and persuade people to purchase the products. The study was conducted based on the qualitative-quantitative method, and the data was collected from the official pages of different famous hotels and fast-food restaurants. For investigation, 50 slogans, 25 from hotels’ and 25 from fast food restaurants’ advertisements, were analyzed based on “verbal techniques” and “power words techniques.” The results of the study point to the comparative analysis of hotel and fast-food slogans, and they are represented with the help of charts and diagrams in statistical numbers. In the conclusion of the research, it became clear that the most frequent verbal technique used was the “we are different and unique” technique, and the most frequent vocabulary types were the “abundance words” and “confidence words” type of words.