A Rhetorical Analysis Of John Swales '

Within the field of discourse analysis, the study of different genres has been approached from a number of linguistic perspectives, and we will follow a functional view in this paper for the study of the subgenre of online advertisements. Functional approaches to language have a long-standing tradition in British scholarship (Firth, 1957 ; Halliday, 2004). The importance of the context, the participants in the communicative event, and the field of discourse are all aspects of language variation which highlight the social function of language as the dominant feature of human communication. Within this framework, John Swales set the foundations of the study of discourse genres with his seminal work on the introduction of research articles (1990), establishing the communicative purpose as the main feature shared by all the texts belonging to the

One of these approaches is Swales’ move–step rhetorical analysis, which proposes a hierarchical classification involving moves and steps, which other authors have further developed or adapted for their own purposes, studying different sections of research papers ( Brett, 1994; Dudley-Evans, 1994 ; Salager-Meyer, 1990) or other genres like business letters ( Bhatia, 1993; Hiranburana, 1996; Vergaro, 2004 ; Zhu, 2001), grant proposals (Connor & Mauranen, 1999), application letters (Upton & Connor, 2001) and letters of recommendation (Precht, 2000). Many of these rhetorical studies have been carried out from a cross-linguistic perspective involving English and Spanish and focusing on different genres, such as scientific abstracts ( López-Arroyo et al., 2007; Martín-Martín, 2003 ; Martín-Martín, 2005), academic book reviews (Suárez & Moreno, 2008), medical research papers (Williams, 2012), football match reports (Díez-Fernández, 2009) and so