Comparing English and Chinese persuasive strategies in Trade Fair invitations: A sociocognitive approach

This paper aims to compare the persuasive strategies used by English and Chinese letters of invitation to trade fairs, from a sociocognitive perspective mainly based on genre study (Swales, 1990) and schema theory (Rumelhart, 1980). Cross-cultural persuasive strategies involving ethos, logos, and pathos are compared in a top-down process. In this approach, a corpus of forty letters of invitation (twenty in Chinese and twenty in English) was examined. It was found that although the English and Chinese letters share the ultimate goal of inviting the reader to the trade fair, they exhibit di¬erent preferences as to whether they appeal to emotion or to logic. The English invitations were found to appeal strongly to logic. The Chinese invitations, by contrast, tended to emphasize an appeal both to logic and to the emotions; the latter is characterized by a formal and respectful register.