The Discourse Strategies of Advertising in Persian Magazines and Newspapers

Abstract Advertising is a kind of discourse in which advertisers try to persuade the addressees by discourse strategies. This article studies the discourse strategies in advertisements of Persian Magazines and Newspapers based on Woods’s views. These strategies are related to 1:sound patterns , which are employing particular plays on sounds such as repetition, rhythm, rhyme and symbolic sound, 2: word choice which is linguistic application of words such as oxymoron words, hyperbole, mentioning the ingredient of the product, and using adjectives like the adjective ‘new’, 3: sentence structure such as using superlative adjective, imperative form, three-part lists, using words without grammar, comparative adjective or adverb, and rhetorical question,4: manipulating meaning such as personalization, presupposition, and personification. These patterns are studied in Persian newspapers and magazines to see which strategies are used and what is the frequency of each one. For this purpose, advertisements of the magazines “ Mofaghiyat, KHanevadeh, KHanevadeyesabz, and Ruzhayezendegi”, and the newspapers JameJam, Hamshahri, Keihan and Ettelaat (10 issues of each one) in 1389 and 1390 were randomly selected and analyzed by descriptive- analytic method. The findings show that some mentioned strategies are not used in Iranian written advertisements, for e.g., personification is not used. Also the frequency of applying different discourse strategies in advertisements is not equal; personalization and superlative adjective equally have the highest frequency, rhythm has the lowest frequency, and the rest have different frequencies between these two ends.