Persuasion Across Genres

A linguistic approach

Edited by Helena Halmari and Tuija Virtanen
Sam Houston State University / Åbo Akademi University
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.

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 130]  2005.  x, 257 pp.
Publishing status: Available
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027253736 (Eur) | EUR 110.00
ISBN 9781588115881 (USA) | USD 165.00
 
e-BookSold by e-book platforms
ISBN 9789027294746 | EUR 110.00 | USD 165.00
 
 

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 Bülow-Møller
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 Östman
183–212
Generic patterns in promotional discourse
Vijay Bhatia
213–225
Concluding remarks
Towards understanding modern persuasion
Helena Halmari and Tuija Virtanen
229–244
Author Index
245–248
Subject Index
249–257

Quotes

“This book should be of interest to anyone interested in persuasion and in genre studies.”
Élisabeth Le, University of Alberta, on Linguist List 16.2683 (September 2005)
“This volume is of a value to those interested in Applied Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Corpus-based approaches to Linguistics, and Rhetoric. The collection may also be of interest to non-specialists, as many of the contributions are accessible to the non-linguist. The chapters succesfully unite divergent aspects of persuasion and methodologies of analysis, while adhering to the editors' view of persuasion as implicit and an essential factor in genre dynamics. The concluding remarks succesfully lend coherence to the collection of articles and the papers together thematically.”
Beatriz Verdasco Vidal, in Discourse Sudies 8 (6)
“This collection is strongly recommended and will be invaluable not only to all students and researchers interested in approaching persuasion, genre theory and their interface from various perspectives, but also to those who are generally engaged in the study of and research in applied linguistics, text and discourse linguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis.”
Aleksander Čarapi ć, University of Belgrade, Serbia, in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol. 16:2 (2006)

Subjects

Benjamins Subject classification

BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2004057456
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