Abstract:
The discourse of Insurance is constructed and disseminated as part and parcel of the modern
life of people. Propaganda and awareness are always visible and universal in media and
institutional communication. However, policy development and implementation standards
differ from country to country, especially between developed and developing countries. This
paper investigates a national newspaper editorial promoting insurance in Sri Lanka. The title
of the editorial is ‘New vistas in insurance,’ which appeared on June 28, 2019, in Daily News.
A linguistic approach called critical discourse analysis was used to trace general as well as
ideological socio-cultural and political-economic implications covertly or overtly found in the
editorial. The positions and the identities of the discourse constructor, the insurer, and the
insured are unfolded using critical linguistic strategies while revealing the constructed
contextual meaning or notions. The findings were that personalization strategy is used to make
insurance a fundamental need to life, spiritualization makes insurance an inevitable agent to
safeguard religion and religious leaders, acculturation makes insurance a part of our culture,
politicization and development agentization make insurance a leader to be respected and
followed. All these strategies are used in the form of the apparent altruism, contrast, transfer
moves, fore- and backgrounding, assumed and asserted evaluation, emotional, ethical and
logical appeals to create fear of imminent risk and relief of life-time benefits. The linguistic
strategies such as nominalization, verb and voice choice, word choices for verb and noun
modification, transition words contribute to the discourse strategies, especially, the discourse
of insurance promotion. This study complements the need for further discourse analysis of the
Sri Lankan media for their persuasion strategies in the political, economic, and socio-cultural
contexts of Sri Lanka.
