This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad’s (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell’s (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales’ (1990) genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.

The volume aims to advance understanding of argumentative practices in different communicative contexts, with special regard for those with heightened public resonance: politics, media, and public debate in general. Furthermore, it intends to explore the linguistic aspects of argumentation, including both explicit codification, with the related issue of indicators, and the activation of implicit meanings. Bringing together different paradigms to account for the relations between contextual factors and discourse realizations, the contributions articulate around three foci, placing emphasis on one or more of them: the communicative purpose within a given genre or activity type; the argumentative and linguistic features of the investigated discourses, among which prototypical patterns, argumentative styles, and implicit meanings; the assessment of argumentation quality and strategies to cope with illegitimate practices.

The volume aims to advance understanding of argumentative practices in different communicative contexts, with special regard for those with heightened public resonance: politics, media, and public debate in general. Furthermore, it intends to explore the linguistic aspects of argumentation, including both explicit codification, with the related issue of indicators, and the activation of implicit meanings. Bringing together different paradigms to account for the relations between contextual factors and discourse realizations, the contributions articulate around three foci, placing emphasis on one or more of them: the communicative purpose within a given genre or activity type; the argumentative and linguistic features of the investigated discourses, among which prototypical patterns, argumentative styles, and implicit meanings; the assessment of argumentation quality and strategies to cope with illegitimate practices.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, bringing forth studies on the language of various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

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.

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.

Maurizio Gotti analyses the various features of specialized discourse in order to assess its degree of specificity and diversification, as compared to general language. Prior to any analysis of such traits, the notion of specialized discourse and its distinctive properties are clarified.

Most people have to communicate with colleagues every day and persuade them to understand their opinions or to accept their views. This handbook is intended for anyone who is interested in such goal-oriented language. It extracts 300 persuasive tactics from research findings in communication, linguistics, pragmatics and related fields, and presents them in a clear, concise and consistent manner. Such tactics as analogy, argument presentation, humour and metaphor are included. Each tactic is presented on a separate page with an analysis of its persuasive value. Two indexes - one by persuasive need and the other by tactic - allow readers full flexibility to use the handbook in their own way. This work should be of interest in courses which deal with the management of interaction, pragmatics, discourse analysis and communications.

This volume addresses demands on external and internal science communication in times of crisis. The contributions discuss present crises such as COVID-19 (e.g. vaccination campaigns or political reactions towards the pandemic in the context of science scepticism), and climate change (e.g. plausibility judgements or the role of scientists). They also relate their approaches to past crises, e.g. 9/11 or the Galileo affair. This volume is unique in that it is interdisciplinary from a theoretical and methodological perspective. In that respect, the authors apply concepts from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, news values analysis, pragmatics and terminology research to various types of data, such as newspaper headlines, Tweets, open letters, corpora or glossaries. The case studies are situated within different cultural contexts, with various languages being examined, i.e. Polish, Arabic, English, French, German, and Spanish. Elevating our understanding of the interface of science communication and crisis communication, this collection of articles proves valuable to scholars and students from linguistics, communication science, political science, sociology and philosophy of science.

This collection of papers explores some facets in the areas of Corpus Linguistics and Phraseology which have gone unnoticed so far. With the aid of a range of different corpora and new-generation software tools, the authors tackle specialized domains and discourse in specialized settings, utilizing some innovative approaches to the study of recurrent features and patterns in the languages of economics, history, linguistics, politics, and other fields. The papers critically examine contemporary discourses in which experts and laypersons are equally involved, showing that the spoken and written texts, selected from various specialized corpora, can be seen as collective memory banks. The series of reflections and specialized meanings uncovered in these texts are closely tied to particular sequences of patterned chunks in language and offer exciting insights into the inseparability of lexis and grammar.The contributions to this volume were previously published in "International Journal of Corpus Linguistics" 13:3 (2008).