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.
The early 1990s saw the proposal for ‘people first’ language: premodified nouns (
disabled people) were to be replaced by postmodified nouns (
people with disabilities). This usage was widely adopted ...in the fields of education and psychology. This article examines the distribution of both patterns in the electronic archives of the
Houston Chronicle from 2002 to 2007, well after the suggestion for postmodification euphemism was launched, to investigate how widely the pattern has been adopted in everyday language use. The data from the
Houston Chronicle are compared to the usage patterns in
Google News
(
http://news.google.com/).
Contrary to the usage in contemporary educational and psychological literature, the
Houston Chronicle seems to favor the ‘non-PC’ usage: over 70% of the phrases resort to premodification. The distribution of ‘non-PC’ vs. ‘PC’ phrases, however, is not random: premodification refers to ‘undesirable’ societal elements (e.g., prisoners) or, for instance, to fictional characters in movie descriptions; by contrast, postmodification is reserved for children or non-criminal adults. The juxtaposition of these patterns in contemporary newspaper articles, and their deliberate separation in terms of the semantics of the referent (premodification for ‘undesirable’ or fictional referents; postmodification for ‘vulnerable’ referents) is likely to block the broader adoption of the ‘PC’ syntactic pattern and will ultimately fuel a desire for further euphemisms dependent on lexical innovations. The same patterns appear in
Google News; however, lexically ‘non-PC’ usage, together with metalinguistic discussions of how to refer to the target group are much more prevalent in
Google News than in the
Houston Chronicle.
Bilingual codeswitching is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, which calls for explanations on several different linguistic levels. This volume focuses on one such level: the level of syntax. An ...explanation for the regularities and consistencies in the codeswitching patterns of American Finns in their spontaneous conversations is sought for in the Universal Grammar -based principle of government as realized in case-assignment and agreement relations. A bulk of the Finnish-English intrasentential data get their explanation on the structural, hierarchical level, but this level of syntax is found to be interestingly intertwined with sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse levels, which all contribute to variation in codeswitching patterns. The proposed principle of government is seen as one important explanation in typologically certain kinds of language pairs such as Finnish and English; however, this principle is not treated as a monolithic constraint, but rather as the leading tendency which is occasionally overridden by other than syntactic forces.The volume is intended as a complement - not as a contradiction - to earlier explanations of codeswitching phenomena. Its main message is: while all linguistic levels contribute to the construction of bilingual speech, the importance of syntax can not be ignored.
This article investigates the rhetorical strategies deployed by President Clinton and Senator Dole during the 1996 presidential debates. Clinton resorted to implicit persuasion and audience-oriented ...rhetorical strategies, while Doles persuasion was more explicit, and he did not avoid the use of dispreferred strategies such as opening his answers with the discourse particle well . There were differences in the candidates use of personal pronouns: Dole used I, you , and they more, whereas Clinton employed the audience-inclusive we heavily. Clintons syntax and the content of his turns were coherently organized; Doles syntax showed occasional incoherence. The article does not claim that the use of successful rhetorical strategies is a necessary requirement for electoral success; it does, however, claim that a good orator is more likely to succeed.
This article is a case study investigating the maintenance of Finnish in the language of two young Finnish-American bilinguals. The main source of data is a 90mins audio-taped conversation between ...the research participants, which was recorded in Finland after they had lived eight years in the United States and become fully fluent in English. Three main questions are addressed: (1) Are there signs of first language attrition or change from Finland-Finnish patterns in the area of morphosyntax? (2) Are there signs of imperfect acquisition of Finnish lexicon? (3) Can the research participants' codeswithing patterns be seen as indications of attrition in Finnish morphosyntax and/or imperfect acquisition of Finnish?
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