مشخصات پژوهش

The essentially dialogic nature of the 'discourse' of marketing persuades business communities to use language strategically to perform their work. Business organizations and their prompting substructure strive to attract consumers, induce those to corporate with social media in order to fetch their voice to competitive world of business and to tender their ideas to their audience. Twitter as a microblogging social media provides a suitable context for organizations to interact with consumers and project their capabilities. The present study investigates the rhetorical strategies that are used by Iran-Air and Alitalia Airlines for persuasion in the world of marketing. The method is descriptive and the theoretical framework is based on Burke's (1969) dramatistic approach which requires the analyst to view human action as theatrical, discernible in a pentad of interrelated elements: act, scene, agent, agency and purpose in order to determine the nature and reason(s) of human action. The results of the study implied that both Iran-Air and Alitalia acted similarly in their concern for globally expanding the chances of travel for tourism purposes. However, the underlying thought patterns of two companies differed in the attribution of their motives and in the use of English as a means for tweeting.