A corpus-based study of Thai persuasive texts : a transitivity analysis of talisman advertisements

Abstract

This study aims to explore talisman advertisements as examples of persuasive discourse widely found in Thailand. In the Thai context, the advertising of talismans and Buddha images seems prevalent in a wide range of printed media - leaflets, newspapers, magazines, and books. Data for this paper are drawn from a corpus consisting of twenty talisman advertisements. All of them are taken from Thailand';s best selling-printed newspaper - Thairath. This talisman corpus is composed of 629 clause complexes and 2,565 clause simplexes (involving a little over 20,000 words). The study explores the talisman advertisements stratally by investigating three strata - context, semantics and lexicogrammar. Contextually, the generic structure of the persuasive discourse - Generic Structural Potential (Hasan, 1984b/1996) - is proposed. Semantically, some nuclear and elaborative semantic properties realizing each generic stage are discussed. Lexicogrammatically, an exploration of experiential resources is the main focus of this study: how talisman advertisements are construed grammatically in the transitivity system of Thai.