Analyzing linguistic and rhetorical persuasion devices in advertising discourse: a study of Croatian editions of Cosmopolitan and Elle magazines

Aim: To analyze the persuasion strategies used in the ad-vertising discourse of Croatian editions of Cosmopolitan and Elle magazines. To achieve this, we investigated the linguis-tic and rhetorical strategies of persuasion in women’s mag-azines and determined at which linguistic level they com-monly appear. Methods: We selected five issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and five issues of Elle magazine from which we extracted 133 advertisements for analysis using a combined, linguis-tic and rhetorical classification. Specifically, we analyzed the linguistic devices on lexical, semantic, morphological, and syntactic levels, and the rhetorical devices as a separate category, based on Aristotle’s concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos. The initial assumption was that effective advertising would employ strategies across all linguistic levels, but the second assumption was that most of them would appear on the lexical level, given the number of nouns, verbs, adjec-tives, and English loans in ads that contribute to showing the products in the best possible light. Results: We identified 258 devices, of which 235 were lin-guistic and 23 were rhetorical. Devices on all linguistic lev-els were used in the analysis. The majority of techniques were found at the lexical level (n = 203), followed by the se-mantic (n = 23), rhetorical (n = 23), morphological (n = 5), and syntactic (n = 4) devices. Conclusion: Employing devices across all linguistic levels is understandable given advertisers’ inclination to utilize all available means to shape ads that can boost sales. Lexical level offers the broadest array of words to directly praise and glorify the product – an approach advertisers believe is the best and easiest way to persuade potential consumers. Combining different linguistic and rhetorical devices is a useful strategy for selling the product, which is always ad-vertisers’ ultimate goal