Rhetoric in Shona audio agricultural adverts aired on Radio Zimbabwe

Since the beginning of Zimbabwe s Land Reform Programme in the year 2000, the country has experienced massive political as well as socio- economic setbacks. The problem emanating from the fact that when the Zimbabwean war veterans took over farms from white commercial farmers, they lacked the necessary training and resources needed to sustain agricultural productivity, eventually damaging Zimbabwe s once agrarian based economy. As a damage- control mode, the Zimbabwean government has over the years been sponsoring agricultural advertisements and advertising them for free on Radio Zimbabwe in a quest to revive its ailing farming sector. Tape recording was used to capture the advertised data. Structured and unstructured interviews were administered on ten copywriters as well as twenty Zimbabwean farmers in order to understand the nature of the problem under investigation. Consequently, this study analysed the use of rhetoric and linguistic features by copywriters of the Zanu-PF sponsored audio agricultural advertisements aired on Radio Zimbabwe. It was gathered that the copywriters made use of phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic as well as pragmatic features as rhetoric.

Autorentext

The author is an independent published researcher within the areas of media discourse, corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis. His passion for democracy motivates him to continue research on how language theories from applied linguistics can best be used to solve socio- political problems affecting Zimbabwean contemporary politics.

Klappentext

Since the beginning of Zimbabwe s Land Reform Programme in the year 2000, the country has experienced massive political as well as socio- economic setbacks. The problem emanating from the fact that when the Zimbabwean war veterans took over farms from white commercial farmers, they lacked the necessary training and resources needed to sustain agricultural productivity, eventually damaging Zimbabwe s once agrarian based economy. As a damage- control mode, the Zimbabwean government has over the years been sponsoring agricultural advertisements and advertising them for free on Radio Zimbabwe in a quest to revive its ailing farming sector. Tape recording was used to capture the advertised data. Structured and unstructured interviews were administered on ten copywriters as well as twenty Zimbabwean farmers in order to understand the nature of the problem under investigation. Consequently, this study analysed the use of rhetoric and linguistic features by copywriters of the Zanu-PF sponsored audio agricultural advertisements aired on Radio Zimbabwe. It was gathered that the copywriters made use of phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic as well as pragmatic features as rhetoric.