Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Manuchehr Naderi Varandi ¹
• Vida Shaghaghi ²
• Pantea Foroudi ³
• Shahla Raghibdoust ⁴
• Mohamadtaghi Taghavifard ⁵

¹ Ph.D. student of general linguistics, Faculty of humanities and foreign languages,Allameh Tabataba’i universiry, Tehran, Iran

² Faculty member, Department of linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i university, Corresponding author, Tehran, Iran

³ Department of Marketing, Branding, and Tourism- Business School- Middlesex University London

⁴ Faculty member, Department of linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i university, Tehran, Iran

⁵ Faculty member, Department of industrial engineering, Allameh Tabataba’i university, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Abstract
The purpose of this study is to find out the role of textual paralinguistic features with an emphasis on letter repetition in social media and the possibility of using these features in advertising and social media marketing. Finding the role of letter repetition with a paralinguistic function can help companies select the most repeated letters in words chosen especially for devising brand names and the most effective sentences henceforth regarding the appropriate contexts. Context has been emphasized for showing the gender, age, and feelings of language users from a sociolinguistic aspect and has taken special attention in interactional sociolinguistics in recent years. The role of letter repetition as a paralinguistic element in advertising contexts with a focus on the effect of this factor on the audience in social media discourse has not been studied in the Persian language. For this purpose, in order to find the frequency of the most repeated letters in Persian language social media discourse, Instagram and Telegram were selected for data mining and the five most repeated letters were identified and selected for further study through three research focusing on the following variables: 1. The use of letter repetition as a paralinguistic factor in social media 2. The use of letter repetition in advertising brand names in social media 3. The pronounceability of brand names and sentential advertisements in social media regarding the paralinguistic use of the five most repeated letters in the written discourse of the Persian language social media. The design of the study was mixed and the research was applied and descriptive of a content analysis type. The population was both male and female subjects with an age range of ten to eighty. In doing the research, both qualitative and quantitative data were used and some phases were followed. First, the primary data were gathered in social media by data-mining through web crawling in Python software. The software was applied to mine the most frequent letters in the Persian language used in written social media discourse and the number of their repetitions. The results of this part were used for designing questionnaires in the second phase of the research. The purpose of the first phase was to find the pattern in the use of letters applied by Iranians in social media. For the validation of the data during this phase, a questionnaire was devised and distributed among the students at the universities in Tehran and their families. In this way, the hypothesis regarding the most repeated letters and their use in social media proposed in the first research question was tested. Moreover, the pronounceability quality of the words with repeated letters was also studied and the use of letters in words in case of being beautifully pronounceable at sentential level was verified for use in advertising and brand names. In the second phase, two questionnaires were devised and distributed among 1508 people in order to assess the relationship of the use of the paralinguistic feature of letter repetition with brand names and the design of sentences in advertisements for marketing purposes. Twenty sentences with some words containing repeated letters were designed to test the pronounceability variable in the questionnaires. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to determine the reliability of the questionnaires and to determine the face and content validity, the corrective comments of experts were applied. The results of the first and second phases of research showed that the highly frequent letters of alif [ɑ] (not the glottal stop), v, y, kh [x] and r are advised to be used for devising brand names regarding the pronounceability factor for marketing purposes. The findings of this research can be used for social media marketing, devising brand names, and advertising written sentences. The use of emojis, punctuation marks, esoteric marks, and other textual features is proposed for future research. The cultural perspective of consumers is a factor that cannot be ignored and the use of paralinguistic elements in different societies and cultures can be of special importance in this regard. Due to the importance of neurology in discourse studies, good research topics can be proposed for finding the role of letter repetition and other paralinguistic features in marketing from a neurolinguistic window, too.
Keywords: Textual Paralanguage, Letter Repetition, Social Media, Marketing, Brand Names, Crawling.

Keywords

• "Persian language"
• "marketing"
• "letter repetition"
• "paralinguistic features"
• "brand names"
• "social media"

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