Metadiscourse in advertising: a comparative analysis of print magazine advertisements and online video advertisements

Metadiscourse is an important resource for shaping persuasion and audience engagement in contemporary advertising culture. While previous research has mainly examined metadiscourse in academic writing, less attention has been paid to how it operates across different advertising modes. This study investigates the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse in written and spoken advertising, represented by print magazine advertisements (PMAs) and online video advertisements (OVAs). Two corpora, comprising 36 PMAs and 10 OVAs, were analyzed through frequency-based and qualitative procedures based on Hyland’s (Citation2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse. The results show that interactional resources are more frequent than interactive resources in both corpora, highlighting the audience-oriented nature of advertising discourse. OVAs make greater use of transitions and frame markers, while PMAs contain relatively more evidentials, endophoric markers, and code glosses, although these occur at low frequencies. All five interactional metadiscourse categories occur significantly more frequently in OVAs than in PMAs. These findings indicate that written and spoken advertising adopt distinct metadiscursive strategies to guide interpretation and build audience involvement. By comparing written and spoken advertising within the same advertising domain, this study extends metadiscourse research by showing how different modes employ distinct metadiscourse strategies to construct persuasion.