Articles

This paper examined the language of persuasion and negotiation in the Ghanaian market context using a local community market (Agartha Market) in Koforidua as a case study. It investigates how the language of persuasion and negotiation is couched in the context of the market by both traders and customers. The theoretical framework within which this study is hinged is the stylistic theory of Leech and Short [1]. Specifically, the grammatical and figure-of-speech prong of the theory have been used. While observation and audio recordings were used to collect the data, the content descriptive method was used in the description and analysis of the data. The findings revealed that, relative to sentence complexity, persuasion and negotiation made adequate use of compound sentences than simple sentence structures. While simple sentence structures are used by traders to attract customers’ attention and arouse their psychological interest and curiosity, customers used them in negotiations for mainly interrogative and position-shift purposes. Compound and complex structures were used by traders for elaborative purposes in order to espouse the good qualities that are inherent in their products in order to convince their customers to buy their wares. Figuratively, repetition, hyperbole, and suspense are the key tropes used. These tropes are dominant in persuasion than in negotiation. Again, while the language of persuasion is monologue that of negotiation is dialogue. Code-mixing is also common characteristic in the language of negotiation and persuasion. The dominant local language (Twi) and the official language (English) are usually used in the communication process. This research thus has implication for research and pedagogy as it extends the literature and can also influence the restructuring of educational polices especially those related to language since society and school (education) are intricately related.

An advertisement is the promotion of a product, brand, or service to customers in order to pique their attention and increase sales. Advertisement comes in many forms, like video, picture, and song. The main purpose of advertising is to make the product or brand known to the public and bought by people. In advertising, the producer or company will use the slogan as the product identity itself. Slogan can give bridge the advertisement about the image of product. In slogan there are short words, often memorable to send a message of the advertisement to the people. This study aimed to analyze the type of figurative language used in advertisement slogan. The design of this research is descriptive qualitative method. In this research, the researchers focused on English slogan of Indonesia advertising. The data were collected from internet, newspaper and television. Furthermore, the collected data were analyzed by Kennedy’s (1983) theory. The researchers found there were 15 English slogan of advertisement. Based on the data analysis, the result of the research showed that the most types figurative language used in advertisement slogan was Metaphor (33,33%) or 5 slogans, personification (26,66%) or 4 slogans, hyperbole (26,66% ) or 4 slogans and symbol (13,33%) 2 slogans. The researchers did not found type of figurative language Simile, Litotes, Synecdoche, Allusion, Paradox, Irony, Ellipsis and Metanymy in advertisement slogans. As we can see, the dominant type of figurative language used in advertisement slogan was Metaphor with total amount 5 slogans (33,33%) from the data.