دراسة تداولية اجتماعية لاستراتيجيات الإقناع في أسماء محلات مختارة في مدينة كربلاء

Rp-A Socio-Pragmatic Study of Persuasive Strategies in Selected Names of Shops in Karbala City.pd

The present study seeks to investigate and analyse persuasive strategies used in naming shops in Karbala City. The study attempts to make people more aware of these strategies since persuasive strategies nowadays are one of the necessities in the marketing field. For the best of the researcher’s view point, no other study has investigated persuasive strategies used in shop names, especially from a sociopragmatic perspective, so the present study endeavours to fill this gap and aims to uncover the main strategies used in shop names for persuasion. By focusing on the aim, the study hypothesises that monolingual English shop names are used to convince customers that the products have modernity, value, and foreign quality, and this usage is affected by the shop owners’ level of education and the gender of the shops. Regarding other strategies, it hypothesises that ethos and pathos are employed in shop names as persuasive strategies; assertive and directive speech acts are used in shop names as persuasive speech acts; finally, off-record and bald-on record politeness strategies are utilised in shop names for persuasion. To achieve the aim of this study, an eclectic model of analysis is adopted for analysing the data. The model comprises Searle’s (1969) speech acts, Lucas’s (2009) persuasive strategies, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies, and selected social variables. The current study is limited to 40 shop names written in English selected from the centre of Karbala City, which is chosen as a sample for this study. The participants’ sample includes 40 shop owners from the city center. The results of the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the gathered data show that monolingual English usage in shop names implies certain persuasive purposes, and the variables (education, gender) have a significant effect on this usage. Regarding other persuasive strategies, pathos has a high level of occurrence in shop names, while ethos rarely occurs. The analysis also indicates that assertives are the most frequent speech acts used in shop names, while directives have a low level of occurrence. Similarly, off-records are used with a high level of frequency in comparison with bald on record, since shop owners prefer to convince customers indirectly and avoid imposing upon their buying decisions.