Cross-Linguistic Study of Persuasion in British and Iraqi Magazine Discourse

Abstract

This paper is a study of persuasive power of print advertisements  in  selected British and Iraqi  magazines written in an effort to grab people’s attention  to purchase  a specific product via using various strategies and markers on three levels of language :syntax, semantics ,and phonology. (100  ) British print  advertisements and similar number of Iraqi ones with different interests are designated  from  common and prominent magazines such as, Time , Design Guide, Shebeka, Meshaheer al Eraq  Babylon to be the corpus of this study .The issues of the selected  advertisements are: cosmetic, food , cleaners, machines, and cars, twenty for each .Based on Short and Leech (1981) model, the data are analyzed  in terms of the occurred vocabularies , lexical terms, and grammatical categories to display the  general lay out of the corpus .Additionally,  Chi Square Test and SPSS V.25 program are applied to carry out qualitative as well as quantitive analysis. The research reveals that the data belong to two languages of different nature witness  the  high occurrence  of the syntactic   persuasive markers  specifically and attention strategy  as they both comprise  means such as ellipsis , capitalization , and using photos of  famous people  that all  aid in building the fitting structure of advs. Further, though slight differences exist between the Iraqi and the British advertisements in terms of the used vocabularies and  the spreading of persuasive  devices in a particular category rather than others , still they are similar in their general layout.