A Discourse Analysis Of Advertisement Email Subject Lines

Syeda Zahida Rizvi

University of Management & Technology, Lahore
zahida.rizvi@umt.edu.pk
Zainab Asghar

University of Management & Technology, Lahore

zainab.asghar@umt.edu.pk
Huma Iqbal
University of Management & Technology, Lahore
huma.iqbal@umt.edu.pk
Emails are not only a way to communicate instantaneously with our family, friends, colleagues
and acquaintances all around the world, but they have also become an important tool for
advertisers to advertise their products. In this way the advertisers affect the purchasing behavior
of the people by crafting eye-catching subject lines for their advertisement emails. Therefore,
this study tends to analyze the linguistic content of the advertisement email subject lines. The
research question is: How do the language of advertisement email subjects affect or manipulate
the Customer behavior? The researcher employs Discourse Analysis (DA) of James Paul Gee as
a theoretical framework. From the Discourse Analysis tools “The Significance Building Tool”
“The doing not just saying tool” and “The connections building tools” are used to analyze the
data since the study contends that the advertisers use language to make their goods or products
significant and stand out among other products. The researcher selected 10 respondents through
random sampling and asked them to send advertisement emails which they receive in their email
account. Furthermore, by employing Purposive sampling, some subject lines were selected for
analysis. It was found out that advertisers use not only advertisement techniques but also
different linguistic devices (such as speech acts, bold, capital and block words, exclamation
marks, poetic devices etc.) to affect the buying behavior of the receivers. The findings will offer
consumers to have an insight about the manipulative language of advertisement email subjects
crafted by the advertisers.
KEY WORDS: Email, Advertisement, Subject line, Discourse Analysis, Significance Building
Tool, Manipulative language

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