The Language of Persuasion in Advertising. A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: The thesis at hand puts a special emphasis on the use of persuasive language in online native advertisements from The New York Times. After careful examination, the corpus will be compiled of three native advertisements from the field of technology, by the sponsors Intel, Dropbox and Slack. The limitation to these native advertisements and persuasive linguistic devices and techniques was necessary with regard to the scope of this thesis. As no linguistic analysis of native advertisements could be found, there also was no reference to follow. Therefore, the thesis at hand lays the foundation for further research in this area. The aim is to conduct a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis in order to investigate and answer two main questions:

1. Do online native advertisements make use of the same persuasion methods as previously researched for other advertising types?
2. What are the most prominent persuasive linguistic devices and techniques in the online native advertisements from The New York Times?

In addition to the CDA, the corpus-based approach is expected to provide quantitative evidence of the existence of discourse and to identify repetitive linguistic patterns of persuasive language use in native advertising.
The thesis will be structured as follows. First, the theoretical framework provides general information about the functions and characteristics of advertising, while further focusing on native advertisement and the language of advertising. It continues with explaining the concept of persuasive language on the basis of ethos, logos and pathos and introduces some powerful persuasive techniques in advertisement. Further, linguistic devices of persuasive language on the phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic level will be defined. Additionally, the concept of Critical Discourse Analysis will be explained in detail, as the thesis at hand follows the CDA framework of Fairclough. The data collection method and data analysis procedure will be outlined in Chapter 3. This is followed by an analysis of three online native advertisements from the publisher The New York Times. After the analysis, the results will be presented and evaluated in order to assess the hypothesis. Finally, the conclusion provides a summary of the findings and suggests further research opportunities.