1.1 Introduction
Human communication is essentially goal-oriented. When interacting with others, we consciously or subconsciously try to make them talk to us, take part in what we do, share our opinion or preferences, believe what we say or support our projects and actions. This implies that all communication can be regarded as inevitably persuasive (Duffy & Thorson, 2016; Miller, 2013). Recognising the persuasive intent of a speaker or writer, however, may not always be easy, as persuasion may be conveyed explicitly or implicitly via an array of strategies and audio-visual and language means which vary across different situational and cultural contexts. This book explores the rhetorical strategies and linguistic means used to convey persuasion across specialised discourses pertaining to different spheres of social interaction. In this it draws on previous work (e.g. Dillard & Pfau, 2002; Dillard & Shen, 2013; Halmari & Virtanen, 2005; Lunsford, Wilson, & Eberly, 2009; Orts Llopis, Breeze, & Gotti, 2017; Pelclová & Lu, 2018), endeavouring to map the common denominators of persuasion across genres and discourses as well as the context-specific manifestations of persuasion in various professional and public settings. Moreover, this study addresses the issue of variation in persuasive strategies and persuasive language across different linguacultural backgrounds, a dimension which has not yet received systematic treatment in persuasion research. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap by adopting a doubly contrastive perspective to the study of persuasion as it analyses rhetorical strategies and linguistic means instrumental in the build-up of persuasive discourse in four specialised discourses (academic, business, religious and technical) and two languages (English and Czech).
Anchored in the functional approach to language and adopting an intercultural rhetoric perspective (Connor, 2004, 2008), this volume conceptualises persuasion as an essentially context-sensitive phenomenon emerging in the process of complex social interaction and reflecting meaning negotiations “within and between cultures” (McIntosh, Connor, & Gokpinar-Shelton, 2017, p. 13). The analytical methods applied in this book comprise qualitative analyses of rhetorical strategies essential to the study of persuasion complemented by corpus-based quantitative analyses of specific linguistic realisations of persuasion; this multifaceted approach combining bottom-up and the top-down perspectives provides a solid basis for exploring how two languages and cultures articulate persuasion across different contexts and genres.
1.2 Persuasion: Definitions and Approaches
Persuasion has attracted the attention of scholars exploring human interaction from antiquity to the present day. Undertaken from various perspectives, such as rhetoric, communication studies, psychology, sociology, political science and linguistics, research into persuasion has striven to identify the constitutive features of persuasive communication and to understand how persuasive strategies and persuasive language are used to shape human interaction. The following brief review of approaches to persuasion aims to highlight the features of persuasion central for this research.
The study of persuasive rhetoric is essentially anchored in the Classical Rhetoric model proposed by Aristotle in the fourth century BC (Perloff, 2010, p. 27). The Aristotelian model comprises three persuasive appeals, which Kinneavy (1971) associates with the key components of the act of communication—the speaker, the message and the audience (cf. Killingsworth, 2005, p. 26). Within this model, the persuasive intention is seen as conveyed by a combination of three closely interwoven rhetorical appeals—(i) ethos, the ethical appeal related to credibility and attractiveness of the speaker’s character mediated by the voice of the persuader, (ii) pathos, the emotional appeal to the feelings, attitudes and values of the audience and (iii) logos, the logical appeal to the rationality of the audience based on evidence and reference to the real world. Although Aristotle implicitly assumed that persuasion may stem from the audience (Virtanen & Halmari, 2005, p. 7), Modern Rhetoric has questioned the analytical potential of the Aristotelian triad, claiming that it overestimates the importance of logical proofs and views the speaker-audience relationship as unidirectional and manipulative (Ede & Lunsford, 1984; Hogan, 2013; Mulholland, 1994). Revising the classical model, the Modern Rhetoric approach conceives persuasion as a dialogic, dynamic and interpretative process in which the audience plays a decisive role and acknowledges that when engaging in persuasive communication, the speaker may assume various roles to address multiple audiences (cf. Bell’s, 1997, audience design framework). Persuasion is thus regarded as part of the more general notion of argumentation (e.g. Hogan, 2013; van Emeren, 1986), which, according to Perelman (1982), “covers the whole range of discourse that aims at persuasion and conviction, whatever the audience addressed and whatever the subject-matter” (p. 5).
In this book, the anticipated audience reaction to different types of persuasive appeal is analysed within Sperber et al.’s (2010) epistemic trust and vigilance framework, which accounts for the way in which information is processed in human communication. This approach is based on the assumption that when communicating, the participants are striving to achieve two goals: to be understood and to make their audience think or act according to what is to be understood, although the audience may comprehend the message without believing it. The assessment of the trustworthiness of what is communicated is assumed to be carried out on the basis of two types of epistemic vigilance processes: (a) assessment of the reliability of the speaker (cf. ethos) and (b) assessment of the reliability of the content conveyed (cf. logos). Thus the speaker is expected to represent him/herself as a reliable source of information by constructing an existentially coherent image ...