A Comparative Analysis of Reference Cohesive Devices in Persian and English Advertising Texts: A Case Study of Food Products

Today, advertising plays a significant and indisputable role in human life and in many different aspects of human societies, and for this reason, promotional texts are also very important. From a linguistic perspective, in particular Halliday and Hassan's (1976) theory of cohesion, one of the important criteria for the meaningfulness and effectiveness of a text is cohesion. Therefore, it is expected that the advertising texts that are intended to persuade and influence the audience will also be strongly coherent. The main questions of this research are: What is the role of reference, as one of the cohesive devices, in creating cohesion of advertising texts? And what are the similarities and differences between the use of this cohesive device in English and Persian advertisement? Considering the importance and prosperity of food product advertising among different types of advertising, the data (15 Persian and 15 English advertisement texts) were randomly selected during a three-month period from March 2019 to May 2019. Product and food advertising have been featured on television and satellite channels. The findings of the study indicate that the frequency of demonstrative reference in Persian advertising is more than personal and comparative reference, while in English advertising the frequency of personal reference is much higher than the other two types. Among the types of personal reference, reference to the audience was the most frequently used one in both Persian and English corpuses. The results can be explained by considering the purpose of advertising which is to address and persuade the audience. The results also suggest that while personal references appear as parts of nominal groups in Persian texts, they appear as parts of adverbial groups in English texts Also, among the types of comparative references in both texts, the use of specific comparative references is more common.