Which ones belong to linguistics?

[kidvisions]

Hello everyone,

I was thinking about these topics recently and I wanted to know your opinion about whether or not they belong to linguistics and which ones would you consider working on and how you would go about it.
So here is a list of the questions/ideas I have been thinking a lot about lately:

1- Genre analysis of online sales pages and copywriting pages: I am very interested in studying the language used in marketing and especially in sales pages and copywriting pages. How do online companies convince the buyer to purchase their product even though sometimes they do not need it. I have tried to look for similar research but I did not find something on sales pages and copywriting pages.
2- Teaching Foreign languages online; assessing available websites to teach languages online: verbling, livemoocha etc,... are they efficient? How to to guarantee the effectiveness of an online language classroom.
3- A critical discourse analysis of American popular culture: A case study: Politics in the Simpsons.

[lx]

I'd say.

1 - No
2 - Yes
3 - No

The first one is basically marketing and the last one I'm not even sure under what academic discipline I'd put it, a few come to mind. If you haven't found anything on the study of wording on sales pages then you must not have looked very far (I don't mean that in a rude way) because it's a huge area of interest. For copywriting, I'd believe you because that's much more restricted and it's not clear to me what is to be gained in looking at that so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a novel idea. The second one is interesting and quite a plausible study can be done. It can be done from any computer and you could easily get people to do certain lessons over specified times and then administer an online test to evaluate performance, but you might want to first send them a learning styles questionnaire and look to see whether you can nuance your results with what sites might work best with people who have a specific learning type.

[kidvisions]

I'd say.

1 - No
2 - Yes
3 - No

The first one is basically marketing and the last one I'm not even sure under what academic discipline I'd put it, a few come to mind. If you haven't found anything on the study of wording on sales pages then you must not have looked very far (I don't mean that in a rude way) because it's a huge area of interest. For copywriting, I'd believe you because that's much more restricted and it's not clear to me what is to be gained in looking at that so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a novel idea. The second one is interesting and quite a plausible study can be done. It can be done from any computer and you could easily get people to do certain lessons over specified times and then administer an online test to evaluate performance, but you might want to first send them a learning styles questionnaire and look to see whether you can nuance your results with what sites might work best with people who have a specific learning type.

Many thanks for your reply. My understanding is that question 1 belongs to text linguistics. It is a genre analysis aiming to categorize texts into different styles.  Critical Discourse analysis is also considered part of linguistics right? Fairclough and Van Dijik worked a lot on it.

[lx]

I suppose it depends on the wider intent and analyses applied, really. Based on the snippets of information and being forced to make a yes/no distinction, that's the way it seemed to me. The explanation you had for the first section did not originally seem to me to classify a text into different styles. You said it was studying how to get people to buy things through the use of language. Again with number three, how you set up the explanation was not really something that seemed like critical discourse analysis because it seemed to be a more general theme of how an issue is dealt with in some media form. Knowing a bit more about how an idea would be considered can change the answer quite quickly .

[kidvisions]

I apologize for not being clear enough. Thank you for helping me put the ideas into a linguistic perspective. Now, which one do you think is more interesting to research and can generate interesting findings?

[lx]

Undoubtedly the one about assessing the different language teaching media on the web. Not only is it the most interesting but it would have the biggest implication and a lot of people would be interested in any academic findings -- much more so than an investigation into any of the other ideas. Well, a big discovery ways to use language to get people to buy things would be even bigger and have companies wanting to hire you as a consultant but my belief is that this would rest on the idea that we all have the exact same responses to words, which I don't believe is the case. So, I vote for number two.

[kidvisions]

Thank you! I like number two too!  It seems like something I want to do especially that I am in fact an online language teacher.
The reason why I am interested in sales pages and copywriting pages is because you can find a lot of articles/books on how to write them and they all basically point to the same things. What would be interesting though is to look at whether or not the same things these articles and books talk about would work across languages and across cultures.
For instance, in my country Tunisia, advertisement has changed radically over the last couple of years.
If you look at the first adds on TV or if you investigate billboards you'll find that at the beginning they used to be culturally-bound, referring to the Tunisian culture and its values or sometimes for certain products, they would try to reproduce French commercials. With time, this has changed, especially after the revolution. Now we see a lot of American-like ads.

Now, what do you recommend regarding the topic on teaching online?

[GabiV]

1- Genre analysis of online sales pages and copywriting pages: I am very interested in studying the language used in marketing and especially in sales pages and copywriting pages. How do online companies convince the buyer to purchase their product even though sometimes they do not need it. I have tried to look for similar research but I did not find something on sales pages and copywriting pages.

Of course it is a lingusitc topic. I have written a dissertation on the similar topic as I studied russian philology. This belongs to so called cognitive lingustics, mainly to axiological linguistics. I wrote about the principles that the advertisers impose on women and men, and what does it mean to be a real woman and man according to the advertisers. Very interesting