Rhetorical structure and promotional language in baked product descriptions: An English-Spanish contrastive analysis

Abstract

This study explores the relation between rhetorical communicative functions and grammatical categories and more specifically between persuasion and adjectives in online biscuit descriptions. Promotional genres make use of linguistic and non-linguistic strategies to achieve their persuasive function and among the linguistic ones, we find the use of positive adjectives. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to describe the rhetorical structure of online descriptions and the distribution of adjectives in the different rhetorical sections of the genre, and (ii) to analyze the relationship between rhetorical communicative purposes and adjective frequencies to figure out how the communicative purpose of each move/step influences adjective distribution, in English and Spanish. The research is based on an English-Spanish comparable corpus of online baked descriptions, including cookies, cakes, muffins, pastries, crackers, and bread. The contrastive analysis was carried out in two stages, first the rhetorical level was described and then the grammatical one. The most frequent adjectives and their concordances were analyzed to classify them to establish common features that would explain their use in specific rhetorical moves and steps. There is an association between the frequency of positive adjectives and the different rhetorical moves of the genre in both languages. Objective moves and steps show a lower use of adjectives, whereas subjective ones show a greater frequency of adjectives in general and of positive evaluative adjectives in particular, which can be explained by the rhetorical function of the sections where they are used.