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Persuasion in Public Discourse
Cognitive and functional perspectives
e-Book – Open Access 
ISBN 9789027263599
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.
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 79] 2018. vi, 334 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 27 July 2018
Published online on 27 July 2018
© John Benjamins
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Table of Contents
- Persuasion across times, domains and modalities: Theoretical considerations and emerging themesJana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu | pp. 1–18
- Part I. Persuasion from a historical perspective
- Chapter 1. Patterns of persuasion in Hungarian medical discourse domain from the 16th and 17th centuriesAgnes Kuna | pp. 21–42
- Chapter 2. Construction of the speaker’s persuasive image in public discourse: Classical rhetoric revisitedJanja Žmavc | pp. 43–62
- Part II. Persuasion in political discourse
- Chapter 3. Metaphor as a (de-)legitimizing strategy in leadership discourse: The language of crisis in Winston Churchill’s Cold War speechesJan Sebera and Wei-lun Lu | pp. 65–84
- Chapter 4. Fictionalizing scenarios in political discourse: Catalan self-determinationGonzalo Calle Rosingana | pp. 85–108
- Chapter 5. “The end is near”: Negative attitude and fear in political discourseFrancisco O. D. Veloso and Dezheng Feng | pp. 109–124
- Part III. Persuasion in social context
- Chapter 6. Reframing as a persuasive device in public speech: Beyond globalized biodiversityAnna Franca Plastina | pp. 127–148
- Chapter 7. Dissuasion by characterization: The “poisoning” of an heroic analogy in Russian public discourseLudmilla A’Beckett | pp. 149–178
- Part IV. Persuasion in marketing
- Chapter 8. Saving face online: Institutional responses to negative customer reviews on TripAdvisorChristopher Hopkinson | pp. 181–206
- Chapter 9. Constructing the ideal organization: Metaphor in higher education brand communicationCarl Jon Way Ng | pp. 207–224
- Part V. Persuasion in academic discourse
- Chapter 10. Persuasion in academic discourse: Cross-cultural variation in Anglophone and Czech academic book reviewsOlga Dontcheva-Navrátilová | pp. 227–258
- Chapter 11. Promotional strategies in academic writing: Statements of contribution in Spanish and ELF research articlesPilar Mur-Dueñas | pp. 259–278
- Part VI. Persuasion from multimodal perspectives
- Chapter 12. Iconicity in independent noun phrases in print advertising: A multimodal perspectiveJana Pelclová | pp. 281–302
- Chapter 13. Persuasion in musical multimedia: A conceptual blending theory approachMihailo Antović | pp. 303–328
- Subject Index | pp. 329–332
- Name index | pp. 333–334
“The editors of this volume have collated an impressive set of chapters which, through a series of fascinating empirical case studies targeting a variety of contexts, modes and genres of communication where persuasion takes place, demonstrate the power of cognitive and functional linguistics in identifying, analysing, and resisting some of the specific linguistic and other semiotic phenomena involved in the act of persuasion. The book sheds important new light on the discursive dynamics of persuasion.”
Christopher Hart, Lancaster University
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