Persuasion Across Genres: A Linguistic Approach (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

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.

 

Table of contents

 

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction
Persuasion across genres: Emerging perspectives Tuija Virtanen and Helena Halmari	3–24
Focusing on private and semipublic discourse
Persuasion in business negotiations Anne Marie Buelow-Mшller	27–58
Persuasion in judicial argumentation: The Opinions of the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice Tarja Salmi-Tolonen	59–101
Focusing on public discourse
In search of "successful" political persuasion: A comparison of the sytles of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan Helena Halmari	105–134
In a nutshell: Persuasion in the spatially constrained language of advertising Paul Bruthiaux	135–151
"Polls and surveys show": Public opinion as a persuasive device in editorial discourse Tuija Virtanen	153–180
Theoretical considerations
Persuasion as implicit anchoring: The case of collocations Jan-Ola Цstman	183–212
Generic patterns in promotional discourse Vijay K. Bhatia	213–225
Concluding remarks
Towards understanding modern persuasion Helena Halmari and Tuija Virtanen	229–244
Author Index	245–248
Subject Index	249–257