UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12 (2000)
Persuasive communication: The case of marketing
MARIE-ODILE TAILLARD
Two of the goals of human communication are: to be understood and to be
believed. In persuasive communication, both of these acts are fulfilled.
Pragmatists have investigated the first goal and how it is carried out, while
social psychologists have focused on the second goal. This paper attempts to
shed new light on persuasion by reviewing work from both fields and sketching
the outline of a model integrating such work. Relevance theory bridges
communication and cognition and, as such, provides a solid foundation for
further research on persuasion. Marketing communication offers a rich domain of
investigation for this endeavor: we show that pragmatics can only benefit from
an analysis of persuasive communication in an “optimized” context such as
marketing.
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