Rhetorical structure and persuasive features of advertising: An intercultural analysis of English and Arabic online advertisements

Abstract

Nowadays, the bulk of e-commerce is carried out in English. At the same time, however, the emergence and growth of Arab e-commerce has attracted attention from e-commerce giants, such as AliBaba and Amazon. Acquiring a deeper understanding of culture-specific advertising practices is thus quickly becoming necessary for digital advertisers and marketers seeking to tap into both English- and Arabic-speaking consumer markets. Despite this, little has been written on online advertising discourse within the particular contexts. To address this, the present study reports on a pragmatic two-level rhetorical analysis of the macro-structure of the sub-genre of online advertisements in English and Arabic and focuses on the identification of the persuasive linguistic features employed to signal constituent moves. Drawing upon Swales’ move-step model of rhetorical analysis, the exploration of a comparable corpus of 100 online advertisements of skin care products per language introduced new layers in the rhetorical organisation of [online] advertisements. The results revealed that English and Arabic advertisements consisted of both common and culture-specific rhetorical moves. The persuasive strategies employed common lexico-grammatical features at syntactic, semantic, and discoursal level, albeit to a different extent. Overall, the results of this study illustrate that online advertisements of skin care products could be considered as a particular sub-genre with context-specific macro- and micro-structures. Through the investigation of the specific datasets, this study expands upon the existing analytical frameworks used for the study of advertising discourse and adds to the intercultural exploration of the rhetorical structures and persuasive strategies used in online advertisements.