Journal of Counseling, Education and Society
Vol. 7 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Counseling, Education and Society

Assertive dominance and rhetorical integration in tiktok affiliate discourse: a pragmatic-rhetorical study of digital persuasion

Dicky Pramana Putra (Universitas Sebelas Maret)
Muhammad Rohmadi (Universitas Sebelas Maret)



Article Info

Publish Date
24 Jun 2026

Abstract

This study examines the pragmatic strategies of digital persuasion in TikTok Affiliate content, addressing a gap in speech act research on creator-based advertising discourse. A corpus of 166 utterances from 15 videos by three Indonesian creators was analyzed using Searle's (1976) taxonomy and Aristotle's rhetorical framework. Findings reveal three key patterns: (1) assertive speech acts dominate (72.89%), particularly 'mentioning specifications' (38.55%), reflecting a 'trust-first' persuasion logic; (2) logos (60.24%), pathos (25.90%), and ethos (13.86%) operate complementarily within single utterances, not in separate segments; and (3) a consistent illocutionary-rhetorical matrix shows that 'claiming' is paradoxically grounded in ethos (50%) rather than logos, indicating that personal credibility substitutes objective data in this genre. This pragmatic-rhetorical integration, which is more concentrated than in conventional advertising, constitutes the genre's distinctive adaptive response to short-video constraints. Theoretically, the study extends speech act classification to the underexplored domain of affiliate marketing discourse. The findings offer a structured framework for analyzing persuasive language in digital media, with potential applications in educational contexts where critical digital literacy is emphasized.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jces

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Education Environmental Science Law, Crime, Criminology & Criminal Justice Social Sciences Other

Description

Journal of Counseling, Education and Society ISSN: 2716-4896 (Print) , ISSN 2716-4888 (Electronic) is a peer-reviewed journal and scientific journal managed by the ELORA Center for Research & Innovation. Journal of Counseling, Education and Society a multi-disciplinary, peer-refereed open-access ...