Persuasive Function Research Articles

PERSPECTIVA ENUNCIATIVA BAKHTINIANA: ANÁLISE DE UM TEXTO DE CIRCULAÇÃO SOCIAL

Este capítulo trata da análise de um texto de circulação social, a partir de uma reportagem sobre a questão indígena em Mato Grosso do Sul. Parte-se da hipótese de que o discurso citado pode desempenhar funções persuasivas em textos escritos, mesmo com o pressuposto do uso da imparcialidade. Como o enunciado jornalístico comporta as diversas vozes sobre um dado tema, o objetivo principal é analisar o uso do discurso citado e os efeitos de sentidos que esse recurso linguístico pode produzir no interlocutor/leitor. Tem-se como aporte teórico a perspectiva enunciativa sob a ótica de Bakhtin (2003,2004). O corpus do estudo trata de uma reportagem, veiculada no Jornal online Midiamax, de Campo Grande-MS, no período compreendido entre 2014 e 2018. Os resultados mostram que esses recursos linguístico-discursivos arrazoam o fazer narrativo jornalístico e podem funcionar como álibi ao locutor/repórter para dizer/escrever o que diz/escreve como simulacro de verdade na narrativa jornalística.

Journalistic Mass Media Management

This study aims to discuss the Journalistic Mass Media Management. This study use quantitative method. The result shows that Mass media consists of printed mass media and electronic mass media. Print mass media in the form of newspapers, magazines, books, tabloids, and so on. Meanwhile, electronic mass media can be in the form of television, internet and radio. The mass media also has several functions, including an information function, an agenda function, a liaison function for people, an education function, a persuasion function, and an entertaining function. The messages conveyed by the mass media are new, interesting, and important. The effects of the mass media are also very large for society. Self-change in society occurs because of the mass media. The effect of the mass media is also related to the message itself. Today, we know the development of the mass media is very fast. However, it would be nice if the mass media developed to carry messages in accordance with the culture of the Indonesian people. The mass media should provide useful messages for the wider community.

LANGUAGE FUNCTION ACQUISITION OF THREE-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN IN URBAN EDUCATED FAMILY ENVIRONMENT

This article aims to describe the acquisition of language function of three-year-olds in an urban educated family environment. This research utilizes a qualitative approach with a descriptive method. The research subjects are three-year-old children in an educated family environment in the city of Surakarta with a focus on language function. Data are obtained in school, family, and home environment. Data collection uses observation, recording, and note-taking techniques. Data analysis is performed using the translational, phonetic, and referential identity methods. Data validation applies to data source triangulation. The results of the research found three language functions acquired, including information function, exploration function, and persuasion function. The information function is obtained through the stimulation of the school environment, family environment, and play environment. The exploration function is utilized to convey the results of children's learning development. The function of persuasion is used by children to invite or seduce other people. It can be concluded that the three-year-old children are capable of acquiring various language functions with enough vocabulary to utilize them and stimulations at this stage are important and thus encouraged.

How Do We See COVID-19? Visual Iconographies of Racial Contagion

Abstract Contagion media have historically performed the dual functions of scientific and ideological persuasion, often deploying an iconography of racial contagion that combines these two functions. In efforts to halt the spread of the virus, health, science, and media organizations create visual imagery to teach the public to imagine we can see and therefore avoid contaminants that are invisible to the naked eye. Comparison of COVID-19 with other global disease outbreaks shows how a core set of contagion media visualizations are repeatedly deployed with subtle adaptations for unique diseases and display interfaces. The variations among different corpora of contagion media point to the interplay among persistent, transhistorical tropes, particular sites of meaning production, and novel technical affordances. This article will examine a subset of these representational techniques, including microscopic images of the virus, close-ups of disease vectors, global and local maps of contagion, health workers in biohazard suits, and visibly ill patients. The essay argues that techniques for visualizing the invisible produce a narrative logic of causality in COVID-19 that reinforces racist and xenophobic discourses of containment and control with direct and deadly consequences. Mitigation of this pandemic and future pandemics will require not only medical but also representational interventions.

Country Image in Advertising Discourse: Between Commercial and Social Components

The ways of creating the country’s image in the texts of modern Russian commercial advertising, namely, such a variety, which is defined as nationally oriented advertising are discussed in the article. This type of advertising is considered as a multimodal complex, however, special attention is paid to the analysis of linguistic means that provide such advertising with a “reputation” base - it fulfills not only commercial, but also social tasks. The specificity of creating an image of the country in nationally oriented advertising by demonstrating the geographical and ethnographic features of “one’s own”, native, or “foreign” country and mythologizing “one’s own” or “foreign” national character is revealed. It is shown that the positive image of “own” country performs not only the function of promoting goods on the market, but also the function of persuasion and education. It has been established that the image of a “foreign” country ensures positioning in the domestic market of the producing country or the country with which the production tradition of the advertised product is associated. The conclusions and results of the study allow one to gain a more complete picture of the peculiarities of ethnomarketing, ways of manipulating a potential audience by appealing to national values and stereotypes, and contribute to advertology, political linguistics and linguoimagelogy.

Tajemnice ASMR – perspektywa ogólna i lingwistyczna

Artykuł prezentuje zjawisko ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, tłum. pol. samoistna odpowiedź meridianow czuciowych) z perspektywy ogólnej i lingwistycznej. Definicja pojęcia i zreferowanie stanu badań stanowią wprowadzenie do klasyfikacji wyzwalaczy ASMR ze względu na zmysły stanowiące źródło doświadczania tzw. efektu ASMR. Autor przedstawia argumenty za włączeniem dotyku i zapachu do klasyfikacji wyzwalaczy. Lingwistyczna analiza zjawiska koncentruje się wokół fonetycznych właściwości wyzwalaczy głosowych, aspektów onomastycznych – analiza gramatyczna i konceptualna wyodrębnionych 17 klas medionimów (nazw kanałów ASMR) oraz dyskursu jako przestrzeni, w której realizowane są funkcje – fatyczna i socjalizująca (budujące więź w obrębie społeczności ASMR; ich realizacja leży po stronie artysty ASMR) oraz ewaluatywna i perswazyjna (ich realizacja leży po stronie odbiorców nagrań).

The Economic Theory of Advertising: The Directions of Formation

One of the key tools that are traditionally used in solving media strategizing problems is advertising. The impacts of advertising on the processes taking place in the economy are significant and remarkably diverse, thus raising a big question to the media strategists to systematize and classify both the types of such impacts and the economic theories that study it. This work is devoted to the study of this issue: the most significant approaches to a comprehensive study of advertising at various planning periods (from instant to long-term strategic) are presented. We analyze the informative and persuasive functions of advertisement, compare the influence of its visual and textual forms and discuss key points of cognitive and behavior approaches to understand how advertisement affects the consumers’ demand. We describe basic models of economic equilibrium, which take the advertisement influence on different market structures into account, as well as two-sided models of media markets. It is shown that the less developed field of the economics of advertising is behavior and market influence analysis of the firms whose specialization is creating and distributing media content and advertisement. Due to this, we introduce the way to construct a new class of market models involving three types of economic agents — consumers, media firms and economic goods producers.

Onomastic words in English mini-format abstracts of educational and scientific books

The article deals with the analysis of onomastic units in specialized advertisements. The research is based on the English advertising abstracts of textbooks and scientific books from the 20192020 catalogues of British and American publishers. The purpose of this work is to identify semantic and pragmatic parameters of proper names and to determine their role in the realization of the pragmatic function of the text. Abstracts of educational and scientific books are treated as mini-format syncretic units which combine the pragmatics and the linguistic features of advertising and academic discourses. A significant percentage of proper names in the advertising abstracts is considered to be a manifestation of scientific discourse that contributes to the realization of the persuasive function of the advertisement. Semantic analysis of the onomastic units combined with their quantitative analysis result in defining nuclear and peripheral semantic clusters within the aforesaid group of words. Further discourse analysis allows to describe the pragmatic potential of proper names and also to reveal their role in the mechanism of persuasive function realization. Thus, the names of authors, their titles and positions, names of books, universities and their locations turn out to bear the greatest pragmatic charge. Names of literary awards, of structural parts of the book, as well as the names of months specifying publication details prove to be pragmatically significant. The peripheral position is occupied by miscellaneous groups of semantically heterogeneous proper names which are determined by the topic of a particular book. As a result, the high proportion of onomastic units in mini-format advertising abstracts, as well as their high concentration in a narrow semantic field prompt a conclusion that proper names are highly effective in fulfilling the pragmatic potential of the advertising abstracts due to their ability to simultaneously inform and affect.

Evidential adjectives in English and Spanish journalistic opinion discourse

This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of evidential adjectives in terms of their distribution and evidential values in three opinion genres (i.e. editorials, opinion columns and comment articles) in English and Spanish journalistic discourse, based on an ad hoc English-Spanish comparable corpus of newspaper opinion texts. The study focuses on two patterns with an evaluative and persuasive function, both of which conceal the role of the writer as conceptualizer (Marín-Arrese, 2013): ‘It + copular verb + ADJ + that/wh-/if/to-infinitive clause’ (Hunston and Sinclair, 2000) and ‘X + copular verb + ADJ’ (Gruber, 1993). Corpus examples were analyzed according to (1) Tense, Aspect and Mood (TAM) values of copular verbs; (2) degree modification of evidential adjectives; (3) semantic preference and prosody; and (4) type of evidential justification. Results reveal similarities across languages and genres, with evidential adjectives occurring mainly in present tense indicative clauses where the adjective is not modified and has negative semantic preference and prosody. However, the analysis also unveils distinctive genre-related features in the distribution of evidential adjectives, with editorials showing the highest ratio here. Findings also suggest genre preferences and language-specific differences regarding the type of evidential justification employed (i.e. conceptual-based, perceptual-based or report-based inferences).

Modified Phraseological units with a Mythonym Component in English Media

The article is devoted to studying the types of modifications of phraseological units with mythological allusions. The functions performed by them in the English discourse are characterized. The relevance of the study is due to the insufficient knowledge of intentionally modified precedent units - phraseological units with a mythological component - and the specifics of their functioning in the discursive space of the English language. The novelty of the study is seen in the explicitation of the modifications (transformations) classification of precedent units in relation to phraseological units containing mythonyms that refer to ancient Greek myths. The author identifies three main modification types of the precedent units of phraseological units with a mythonym component: semantic, structural-lexical and syntactic. Particular attention is paid to identifying the functions of modified phraseological units in multi-discourse English texts. It is shown that the modification of the considered precedent units allows the author of the statement to originally identify the situations and events illuminated by him (the qualifying function of the modified phraseological units), give the text expressiveness and brightness (expressive-decorative function), convincingly express his point of view (persuasive function), convey irony or create humorous effect through a language game (human function), identify their group affiliation (password function).

Autobiography between Symbolic Formation and Semantic Sequence

Dr. Ghazi Al-Qusaibi experience is of great importance at the level of handling of autobiographies in terms of creativity and impact upon the society with the scientific and cognitive value left to the recipient as a result of accumulating experiences. He shared his countrymen the advancement and development of Saudi society, administratively and scientifically. The richness of his professional experience makes us look forward to studying the limits of overlapping and homogeneity between the subject and the object and their relationship to communicate with the recipients. His autobiography was divided into two parts: in terms of the literary form and the content as well as titles that were divided into titles of knowledge that express the subjectivity of the experience and the individuality of the speech; and highlighting the privacy of the biographer’s life experience, or non-knowledge one that expresses sharing the experience with others whom the time period applies to him, or Profession as officer notes, teacher and his life in management. Al-Qusaibi participated in the two lists with various works in the time period, form, and content. He first wrote a «poetic biography» and then an article entitled «My experience with poetry, diplomacy and other professions», and wrote his autobiography: «A Life in Management». This experiment was more worthy of study in an attempt to know the characteristics of the syntax discourse and its relationship to the semantic level through the objective unit and its role in the semantic sequence by linking the real, simple and complex news, which supports the news’s pragmatic strategies, and its selective, communicative, news and persuasive functions.

Działalność wydawniczo-prasowa Stronnictwa Demokratycznego (1940–1945)


 This article contributes to the research on the press publishing of the Alliance of Democrats during World War II and the occupation, comprising 12 policy documents and brochures, as well as 23 press titles. The author focused on the policy documents of the two main streams in the Alliance of Democrats: “Prostokąt”, the Alliance of Polish Democracy, and its Youth Section: the Young Democracy Movement, as well as main themes in the press published by these entities in the period 1940-1945. The research indicates that the pursuit of the information and persuasion functions allowed for full articulation of the publishers’ views regarding current and future issues that were considered particularly important from the point of view of the party’s policy.

Ethos, Logos and Pathos: Metadiscourse Markers and the Construction of Persuasion in Some Selected Speeches of UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassadors

This paper aims at investigating the linguistic devices used to carry out the persuasive functions of metadiscourse markers employed in David Beckham and Millie Bobby Brown’s speeches at UNICEF, New York, November 20, 2019. It also aims at identifying the similarities and the differences between the various persuasive appeals and strategies employed in the speeches of those two celebrities. In order to carry out these goals, the research follows Conner and Lauer’s (1985) model of persuasion and Dafouz-Milne’s (2008) theory of metadiscourse markers. Results suggest that many subcategories of both textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers are found in the speeches of both goodwill ambassadors except for reminders, topicalisers and probability adverbs, but there are some variations in using them. Findings also prove that logical markers are the most used textual metadiscourse markers in both discourses and that the dominant interpersonal linguistic features in both speeches are those which belong to the category of commentaries. According to the use of different persuasive appeals, rational appeal is mostly used by Beckham and Millie.

Fungsi Komunikasi dalam Organisasi melalui Grup Percakapan WhatsApp Biro Fasilitasi Kebijakan Energi dan Persidangan Sekretariat Jenderal Dewan Energi Nasional

This research seeks to reveal the communication functions within the organization through the WhatsApp conversation group for Bureau for Energy Policy Facilitation and Trials at the Secretariat General of the National Energy Council. The study uses a qualitative approach with a case study method in the Bureau of Energy Policy and Trial Facilitation. Data were collected through interviews with key informants and documentations. Based on the analysis of communication functions within the organization in this WhatsApp conversation group, the finding shows that the organizational communication functions in the WhatsApp conversation group consisted of informative, regulative, persuasive, and integrative functions as a tool to accelerate information flow. Active participation of all group members is desirable, even though the security of the WhatsApp conversation group is still a concern. WhatsApp conversation groups provide sufficient information needed by employees in carrying out tasks, although as a means of informal communication, it cannot be used as work materials. Thus, it must be supported by further data from the internal application and direct order from the Bureau Chief as part of the confirmation.

Perception and Evaluation of the Balkans as a Powder Keg in the German-language Press Discourse

Media reports have employed the metaphor Pulverfass “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” in the past century to describe the Balkans in general, and the former Yugoslavia in particular, as an area in which unrest has repeatedly occurred and might continue to occur. In everyday and mass media discourse, the use of metaphors has an evaluation function, whereas in the representation of politically relevant processes a persuasive function through which the attitudes and evaluations of the text producer are conveyed to the readers. In this article we will use the example of the metaphor “Pulverfass Balkan (Balkan Powder Keg)” to show how it has become a rating pattern for German-speaking Balkan perceptions since the First World War. The focus of this paper is the analysis of this metaphor in the German-language media reports from the beginning of the First World War to the present - a century later – with the aim of finding out which functions they serve as a pattern of interpretation in the German-language media discourse on the security situation in the Balkans, more specifically in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the metaphor used in this article draws on both conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory. Schwarz-Friesel (2015) examines the metaphorical utterance of the Balkan powder keg in the context of critical cognitive linguistics (CCL). The corpus for this paper consists of archives and articles available online (such as comments, reports, and interviews). The potential significance of the metaphorical expression of the Balkan powder keg is examined on the basis of the selected corpus.

Linguistic variation in the discourse of corporate annual reports: A multi-dimensional analysis

Combining the frameworks of multi-dimensional (MD) analysis and rhetorical structure theory (RST), this study examines the linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of corporate annual reports (CARs) and interprets their underlying functional dimensions. Our corpus consists of texts of corporate 10K reports from firms listed on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE; N of texts = 642, totally 14,674,047 tokens). Five functional dimensions are quantitatively extracted and qualitatively interpreted: (1) expression of direct persuasion; (2) expression of impersonal stance; (3) subjective versus objective positioning; (4) integrative expression of stance versus fragmented expression; and (5) expression of reliability. All these dimensions contribute to the communicative function of persuasion. The analysis of the rhetorical structures of excerpts with high concentrations of co-occurring linguistic features on each dimension further indicates the communicative strategy of persuasion. The proposed MD model is then applied to analyze the effect of firm performance on the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. We found that firm performance can significantly affect the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. CAR discourse from firms with good performance is more reliable. The result reveals managements’ use of concealment strategy in impression management. This study has implications for MD analysis, business discourse analysis, language pedagogy and accounting research.

TRANSLATING HEADLINES IN PRINT BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENTS FROM ENGLISH INTO ARABIC IN UAE

Abstract:Business advertisements are multimodal consumer-oriented texts with persuasive functions. Advertisers create specific advertisements for marketing products/services in specific contexts. The headline in an advertisement is the main element as it attracts attention and summarizes the advertising message. Advertising relies on socio-cultural implications through visual and non-visual elements. When products/services are marketed in a new context with a different language, their advertisements are translated into that language. Because languages have different ways of encoding information, the success of a product/ service in a culturally different context depends on how its advertisement is translated. The structural and cultural differences between English and Arabic and the functional nature of headlines in English business advertisements seem to have direct bearing on how advertising headlines are rendered into Arabic. This study investigates the translation of advertising headlines from English into Arabic in the context of marketing products/services in UAE. The aim is to identify the techniques used in translating headlines and their implications for translation quality and to identify views of Arab customers over the acceptability of Arabic versions of advertising headlines. The study findings indicate that seven translation techniques are used and customers consider Arabic advertisements produced via function-oriented translation techniques more acceptable than translations produced via form-based techniques.

Proud to be poor? Untangling identity politics with the families portrayed in the photobook Courage (1998)

In the early 1990s, several European welfare states embraced the idea that the voice and life knowledge of people in poverty should be recognised in policymaking. In that regard, many authors proclaimed a paradigm shift from advocacy to self-advocacy, emphasising the agency of people in poverty to speak for themselves. Emblematic in these developments in Belgium was the photobook Courage, published in 1998 by an NGO called Movement for People with a Low Income and Children (BMLIK). Through documentary family photography and oral testimonies, Courage develops a visual rhetoric on the citizenship of people in poverty while reframing poverty as a violation of human rights. Historical research demonstrates, however, that Courage was produced by middle-class volunteer allies and is therefore a rhetorical tool for self-advocacy but certainly not a product of self-advocacy. Moreover, many authors have been highly critical of identity politics, since positive imagery can equally be disempowering in reinforcing neo-philanthropical principles of self-help and willpower which ultimately lead away from redistributive policies. This article therefore examines, through oral history with photo elicitation, how the people involved experienced being portrayed as the protagonists of self-advocacy on the poverty problem. The findings show how the portrayed people fluidly (dis)identified over the past 20 years through three intertwined subjective processes involving Courage as an artefact: for remembering (historical function), for assessing (evaluative function) and for advocacy (persuasive function). As such, they appear not as passive objects of others’ campaigning strategies, but as active co-constructors of self-advocacy rhetoric. Some of the pitfalls and potentials of identity politics in the struggle against poverty are discussed.

The Meaning of the Motif of Michael the Archangel’s Dispute with the Devil (Jude 9). A Socio-Rhetorical Perspective

The purpose of this article is to analyze the persuasive functions of the Archangel Michael motif in the Letter of Jude 9 and examine how the laconic reference serves argumentation in the letter and how it affects the recipients.
 We used methods of interpretation in the field of socio-rhetoric according to the interpretation model of V. R. Robbins adapted to the needs of this study: rhetorical analysis, intertextual relations and analysis of the pivotal values of the first-century Mediterranean world.
 The analyzes lead to the conclusion that the condensed form of the allusion to the Archangel Michael motif makes it possible to refer to the crisis of the addressees simultaneously on many levels. It serves positive argumentation based on the ethos, uses the strength of the rich interpretation tradition of the motif and is the key to the proper implementation of the answer in the mechanism challenge-riposte and defining the threat to community identity.

Caveat emptor: boycott through digital humour on the wave of the 2019 Hong Kong protests

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the topic of social media users’ polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ongoing boycott movement of multiple companies consequent upon their actions in response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Apart from presenting the multimodal characteristics of the creative digital data through the lens of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the central aim is to discuss the functions of users’ political humour online, offering various socio-pragmatic conclusions about the polyvocal participatory practice at hand. It is argued that this digital humour resides solely in the attention-grabbing form, with the otherwise serious posts performing informative and persuasive functions as they convey community members’ socio-political critique. While disparaging the ‘butts’, online users do bonding through collectively expressing their political dissent (which also gives them psychological relief) and sharing subversive ideologies. The humorous items inform and warn potential punters and tacitly call for a boycott of the companies that bow to the regime, all in an act of solidarity with Hong Kong protesters.