The persuasive language of yoghurt analysis of british and romanian commercials

Abstract

Advertising is as creative a story as an infinitely varied one. Also, a highly manipulative one. In a world where everything is for sale and the competition is fierce, what can dairy producers do to stand out on the market? How to persuade the customers using multiple aspects—look, discourse, intonation, colour, energy, and music—except the one that is most important in such industries—taste? In this paper, we examine TV commercials for yoghurt presented in the United Kingdom and Romania in recent years and find out the common traits and aspects that set them apart. We focus on grammatical and stylistic traits. A thorough analysis is made of the function of the sentences, the tenses used, the polarity, and several syntactical strategies such as simple sentences, minor sentences, ellipsis, parallelism, and anaphora. Also, the phonological aspect is tackled, i.e., alliteration, assonance, and rhyme.