Persuasion in the Mirror Newspaper: A Linguistic Approach to Vuwani Demarcation Discourses

This paper is extracted from a study about persuasion in Vuwani demarcation discourses concerning series of articles released in the “Mirror” newspaper within a period of three years ranging from 2015 to 2017. The purpose of this paper was to explore how communicators within a media text deploy linguistic elements in their verbal and non-verbal messages to persuade targets to comply with their desired goals since message production is a result of a goal-driven process and communication is strategic and purposive to gain compliance. The objectives of this paper were to examine specific goals exhibited in messages constructed by communicators who were involved in the Vuwani demarcation discourses and to flag out linguistic strategies and tactics used by communicators to gain compliance. This paper reviews literature pertaining to communication, compliance gaining, persuasion, message production and language usage. Qualitative research design was taken as an approach for this study and media content analysis was adopted as a research methodology whereby four (4) selected articles in the “Mirror” newspaper pertaining to Vuwani demarcation discourses comprising fifty-one (51) excerpts were considered as the population of the study. Using purposive sampling, fifteen (15) excerpts were selected as the sample of the study, while, discourse analysis was used as the method of data analysis. The findings reveal that there are goals exhibited in messages constructed by communicators, ideological realities expressed and ethnic power-relations between the people of Malamulele and Vuwani. The current researcher recommends further exploration into compliance gaining and persuasion within textual discourse.