Emotional engagement in Thai and Japanese insurance advertising: corpus-based keyword analysis

Advertisements demonstrate patterns of communication that are imagined to be acceptable to the communities at which they are aimed, serving as cultural artefacts that provide insights into shared cultural interpretations and social interactions. Drawing on techniques from corpus linguistics, text linguistics and the Appraisal framework, we conducted an analysis of salient keywords in a collection of Thai and Japanese TV commercials (TVCs) for insurance products in order to identify statistically significant keywords and examine emotional engagement. We reveal how specific keywords and communicative strategies used in the persuasive discourse of the insurance products reflect Thai and Japanese socio-cultural preferences and values. We found that while Thai TVCs demonstrate a higher audience engagement through the use of metadiscourse markers such as engagement markers and emphatics under the theme of moral and family values, Japanese TVCs highlight information-dense content-words, including the extensive use of statistics involving themes of security, health and value propositions.