Persuasion in Specialised Discourses


Book Description

This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad’s (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell’s (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales’ (1990) genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.




Persuasion in Specialised Discourses


Book Description

This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad’s (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell’s (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales’ (1990) genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.




Persuasion in Public Discourse


Book Description

This book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee’s intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English, Czech, Spanish, Slovene, Russian, and Hungarian) are grounded in the frameworks of functional grammar, facework and rapport management, classical rhetoric studies and multimodal discourse analysis and are linked to the constructs of (re)framing, conceptual metaphor and blending, mental space and viewpoint. In addition to traditional genres such as political speeches, news reporting, and advertising, the book also studies texts that examine book reviews, medieval medical recipes, public complaints or anonymous viral videos. Apart from discourse analysts, pragmaticians and cognitive linguists, this book will appeal to cognitive musicologists, semioticians, historical linguists and scholars of related disciplines.




Persuasion in Specialized Discourse


Book Description

The volume aims to advance understanding of argumentative practices in different communicative contexts, with special regard for those with heightened public resonance: politics, media, and public debate in general. Furthermore, it intends to explore the linguistic aspects of argumentation, including both explicit codification, with the related issue of indicators, and the activation of implicit meanings. Bringing together different paradigms to account for the relations between contextual factors and discourse realizations, the contributions articulate around three foci, placing emphasis on one or more of them: the communicative purpose within a given genre or activity type; the argumentative and linguistic features of the investigated discourses, among which prototypical patterns, argumentative styles, and implicit meanings; the assessment of argumentation quality and strategies to cope with illegitimate practices.




Persuasion Across Genres


Book Description

Persuasion, in its various linguistic forms, enters our lives daily. Politicians and the news media attempt to change or confirm our beliefs, while advertisers try to bend our tastes toward buying their products. Persuasion goes on in courtrooms, universities, and the business world. Persuasion pervades interpersonal relations in all social spheres, public and private. And persuasion reaches us via a large number of genres and their intricate interplay.This volume brings together nine chapters which investigate some of the typical genres of modern persuasion. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the authors explore the linguistic features of successful (and unsuccessful) persuasion and the reasons for the variation of persuasive choices as realized in various genres: business negotiations, judicial argumentation, political speech, advertising, newspaper editorials, and news writing. In the final chapter, the editors tie together the two themes — persuasion and genres — by proposing an Intergenre Model. This model assumes that a powerful force behind generic evolution is the perennial need for implicit persuasion.




Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres


Book Description

Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic, promotional and professional domains in English, Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices, both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others, and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches, contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention, impersonation, attribution markers, engagement markers, attitude markers, boosters, hedges, reporting verbs, politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English, but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations, taking into consideration language, specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue, particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.




Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres


Book Description

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, bringing forth studies on the language of various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.




Academic Discourse and Global Publishing


Book Description

Academic Discourse and Global Publishing offers a coherent argument for changes in published academic writing over the past 50 years. Demonstrating how published writing represents academics’ decisions about how best to present their work, their readers and themselves in the global context of a rapidly shifting university system, this book provides: An up-to-date reference on contemporary topics in specialist discourse analysis, current research methodologies and innovative approaches to the study of writing; New insights into conceptual and theoretical issues related to the analysis of academic writing; An accessible introduction to diachronic research in EAP and a case for the value of the diachronic study of texts using corpus techniques; A clear overview of how texts work in interaction and how they relate to evolving institutional and political contexts; Links between the practices of different disciplines and the environments in which they operate, as well as observations on the ways in which they differ. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers of EAP/ESP and Applied Linguistics and will also be of significant interest to academics and students looking to have their work published.




Academic Discourse Across Disciplines


Book Description

This volume reflects the emerging interest in cross-disciplinary variation in both spoken and written academic English, exploring the conventions and modes of persuasion characteristic of different disciplines and which help define academic inquiry. This collection brings together chapters by applied linguists and EAP practitioners from seven different countries. The authors draw on various specialised spoken and written corpora to illustrate the notion of variation and to explore the concept of discipline and the different methodologies they use to investigate these corpora. The book also seeks to make explicit the valuable links that can be made between research into academic speech and writing as text, as process, and as social practice.




Analyzing Multimodality in Specialized Discourse Settings


Book Description

Contemporary society has witnessed radical changes in the field of communications in terms of how messages and meanings are disseminated. Digitalization and the Internet have signalled an exponential rise in the circulation of multimodal texts in which different semiotic resources are orchestrated together to construct meaning in all areas of social life, across languages and cultures, and in diverse specialized discourse domains. This has foregrounded the need to examine the semiotic functions, affordances, and issues at stake in a range of multimodal discourse forms, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of critical multimodal literacy in audiences and learners. This volume develops and extends pioneering research on the intersection between multimodality and specialized discourse. Eight newly commissioned studies offer innovative perspectives on multimodal research methodologies and applications in a variety of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts for practitioners and scholars alike. The volume offers a glimpse at future directions in this dynamic and ever-evolving area of investigation focusing on the synergy between verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in the digital age. Each chapter explores an original area of application: academic, economic, scientific, marketing, legal, medical, political, and tourism. The contributors approach multimodality from a range of theoretical and methodological viewpoints including synchronic and diachronic corpus-based and corpus-aided studies, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. Analytical tools such as multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal transcription, and multimodal annotation software capable of representing the interplay of different semiotic modes - speech, intonation, direction of gaze, facial expressions, gesturing, and spatial positioning of interlocutors - are employed. The diversity of research strands contained in the volume illustrates just some of the vast areas of multimodal knowledge dissemination that are still unmapped. As a cornerstone of communication, multimodality needs exploring in all its facets. These contributions aim to further that cause.