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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Tourism is more than just a leisure or professional activity; it can be considered the representation and discovery of the cultural identity of a country. The concepts and the words which are selected to promote a tourist destination, as well as the accompanying images and the way these modes of communication are organized in a website, inevitably reflect more than just a promotional aim. They mainly represent those social and cultural choices which are peculiar to each country and to each culture, and which are, for this reason, particularly worth investigating. This book proposes an original approach to the study of tourism discourse by combining several methodologies and models: Halliday’s systemic functional grammar; Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar; the AIDA model; the corpus linguistics approach; Hall and Hofstede’s models; and the theories of the universals of translation. The result of this new and complex methodological approach is a detailed linguistic and socio-cultural overview of the most common strategies of persuasion adopted in the tourism discourses of countries such as Italy, Great Britain and Australia. This book will be useful for academics working in the field of multimodal analysis, corpus linguistics, cross-cultural marketing, and cross-cultural studies, and for students of tourism, communication, and marketing studies.

Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue is about the rediscovery of humans as proficient users of language in the sense that – while involved in a dialogue – they listen, observe, discuss, reason, evaluate and conclude; in other words, speakers are no longer interested in defeating the other and proving him/her wrong, but in learning from the other. The volume comprises 12 articles, distributed in two sections – Persuasion in Political Dialogue and Persuasive Strategies in Professional Dialogue – which approach the topic of persuasion as it unfolds from political and professional communication. The articles in the proposed volume depict relevant theoretical and practical issues related to persuasion in two communication sites: politics and workplace, and they are results of consistent research conducted by the contributors in various settings. The contributions provide critical, valuable insights into the dynamic process of creating and maintaining relationships at an individual and at a professional level.

A comprehensive guide to the language of argument, Rhetorical Style offers a renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language. Drawing on key texts from the rhetorical tradition, as well as on newer approaches from linguistics and literary stylistics, Fahnestock demonstrates how word choice, sentence form, and passage construction can combine to create effective spoken and written arguments. With examples from political speeches, non-fiction works, and newspaper reports, Rhetorical Style surveys the arguer's options at the word, sentence, interactive, and passage levels, and illustrates the enduring usefulness of rhetorical stylistics in analyzing and constructing arguments.