Persuasive Goal Research Articles

Equivalence Framing and the Construction of Advocacy Messages

ABSTRACTAlternative messages that present logically equivalent information, often referred to as equivalence frames, have been shown to influence readers' opinions on public issues. While equivalence framing has been studied in the context of issue advocacy, exhibiting pervasive effects across domains of decision‐making, little attention has been paid to whether the general public is able to choose these equivalence frames based on the goal of persuasion. Given that framing effects have important implications on democratic decision‐making, this paper reports on experiments that manipulate the strategic goal of policy advocacy (i.e., supporting alternative policy proposals) and ask respondents to select between equivalence frames to enhance the persuasive power of the advocacy toward the specified goal. Findings across three issue topics suggest that for the general adult population, only a small proportion of people were able to select equivalence frames based on the goal of persuasion with most people failing to do so. Also, a follow‐up study with a university student sample showed that familiarity with one equivalence frame over the other was a more consistent predictor of equivalence frame use than the goal of advocacy in communicating policy issues.

POLITICAL INTERNET MEMES: A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of memes, which are a controversial aspect of modern communication, the subtleties of which have not yet been studied. The analysis of language material shows that the combination of verbal and non-verbal components of memes creates an autonomous information entity that is capable of self-reproduction of the representation of a linguistic personality at the phonetic, lexical, grammatical, cognitive and pragmatic levels in political discourse. In this realm, the concept of the “political internet meme” emerges, denoting a specialized form of political discourse that combines visual and verbal components to sway an audience into the realm of political communication. These memes combine traditional political terminology with colloquial vocabulary strategically designed to achieve persuasive goals. Generally, political internet memes are created through affixation and the use of simplified grammatical structures without articles, often intentionally including spelling and grammatical errors to increase their impact. In pursuit of a comedic effect, the creators of political Internet memes use a whole arsenal of stylistic and linguistic means. These include complex wordplay involving phonetic and morphological manipulations, various expressive techniques, and playful experiments with typography and punctuation. Thanks to such means, memes go beyond the simple transmission of information, turning into powerful tools of political expression and persuasion.

Leaving no room for doubt and exceptions: closing arguments through the lens of metadiscourse

The closing argument in criminal trials allows for unique metadiscourse analysis opportunities. Yet despite these opportunities, it seems to be an understudied linguistic genre which requires more research into its interactional features. This article aims to explore the types, frequencies and functions of boosters as metadiscourse resources employed by defense attorneys to enter a plea of not guilty. In particular, the article describes how attorneys exploit boosters to produce convincing arguments and control the power relationship with an audience. The findings are based on a metadiscourse analysis of 21 closing arguments derived from the famous-trials.com website. As regards the choice of boosting resources to be searched in the corpus, the present study adopted Hyland and Zou’s (2021) taxonomy of boosters. It was revealed that defense attorneys made extensive use of boosters to exert an influence on the outcome of a criminal prosecution against their clients. The results have implications for our understanding of closing argument as a persuasive interactional legal genre and for teaching legal writing to law students. Hopefully, this study will spire lawyers to take advantage of boosters and other metadiscourse resources in their attempt to achieve persuasive goals in trials by jury.

Machine metaphors in 2020 USA electioneering campaign: a cognitive aspect

The conceptual metaphor is a major persuasive tool in political discourse. Therefore, the aim of the research is to analyze the realization of van Dijk’s Ideological Square strategies with the help of machine conceptual metaphors used by the presidential candidates during the 2020 electioneering campaign. The data of the research comprise 99 political speeches delivered by Donald Trump and Joe Biden at rallies. Consequently, the following methods of linguistic analysis were used: a Critical Discourse Analysis, a Conceptual Metaphor Analysis in the form of the method of the reconstruction of conceptual mappings, a comparative method, a contextual analysis, and statistical methods. As a result, the analysis demonstrated that conceptual metaphors, which were identified in the corpus, play an important role in realizing the Ideological Square strategies with persuasive goals. Apart from that, it was established that the conceptual metaphor ECONOMY IS A MACHINE is predominant in Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden's discourses. In addition, the data analysis showed that the majority of metaphors were used to highlight the candidate’s own positive sides while exaggerating his opponent’s disadvantages.

Pathos Configuration in the War Crisis Context

The paper deals, in broad terms, with the discursive functioning of emotions; it proposes a case study: the analysis of the pathemic configuration of the speech delivered by president Zelensky in the joint meeting of the US Congress, on March 16th 2022, within a war crisis context, intrinsically affectively marked. The analysis is set within a rhetorical-argumentative framework, considering the discursive appeal to emotions as a form of “subjective rationality” (Charaudeau 2000), and it aims to highlight the strategic, emotive structuring of the discourse, by means of various intertwining mechanisms of emotional elicitation, with constant reference to the audience’s endoxical profile. As pointed out by the analysis, certain types of (implicit) emotions (sharing a highly active-motivational dimension) are particularly appealed to: basic intensive emotions, such as anger or fear and, especially, sociomoral (both euphoric and dysphoric) emotions, such as pity/compassion, (national) pride, gratitude, admiration, or shame/guilt. Their presence in the speech demarcates a discursive scenario, which supports its main persuasive goal: to obtain the audience’s adhesion to the speaker’s viewpoint, as well as to mobilize a future concrete extra-discursive (re)action.

대통령 취임사의 문법적 특징 연구

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to examine how representative grammatical categories (mood, modality and vocative) are selected and used in presidential inaugural addresses. Through this, the purpose is to show that these grammatical elements and discourse purposes are deeply correlated.
 Methods For this purpose, the logogonetic patterns of systemic functional linguistics, a genre-based grammar theory, were utilized as a research method. Logogenetic patterns are a way to visibly show the relevance of grammatical meaning to the text being analyzed by showing the patterns of meaning that are generated as the text unfolds.
 Results Through the above study, we can see that grammatical elements(mood, modality and vocative) embodied in presidential inaugural addresses are selected and used to achieve the goals of understanding and persuasion. First, the declarative and probability are used to give reasons for the speaker's plans or demands. Next, the use of interrogative and vocative in presidential inaugural addresses serves to increase the intimacy between the speaker and the listener. The imperative, obligation, and complex modalities (obligation + probability) are used to require the listener to do something, but they take the form of obligation or complex modalities rather than the imperative in order to reduce the damage to the listener's face caused by the command. The inclination serves to announce the speaker's plans, while also expressing the speaker's commitment to the listener to fulfill those plans.
 Conclusions This study is significant because it is an example of how language use is not isolated from context, but is used within context. In addition, the usage patterns of mood, modality and vocative presented as research results will help understand the linguistic characteristics of presidential inaugural addresses. Furthermore, in expressive education such as speaking and writing in Korean education and Korean education as a foreign language, the meaning and function of mood, modality and vocative are expected to provide teaching and learning content on the use of language in a persuasive communication context. It is also expected to provide learners with interest and internal motivation in learning.

Striking an Emotional Chord: Effects of Emotional Appeals and Chatbot Anthropomorphism on Persuasive Science Communication

Chatbots have been used to achieve persuasive goals in various communication contexts. This research investigates how chatbot anthropomorphism intersects with emotional appeals to influence persuasive outcomes in science communication by conducting two experiments in the contexts of skin cancer prevention and biodiversity conservation. The findings showed a matching effect between emotional appeals and anthropomorphic cues: For a chatbot with more anthropomorphic cues, fear appeals were more persuasive than hope appeals; in contrast, for a less anthropomorphic chatbot, hope appeals were more effective. A key psychological mechanism underlying the relationships was personal risk perceptions but only for fear appeals.

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Five Selected Online Bank Advertisements

Language remains an indispensable tool used in the advertisement world to communicate. Advertisements as forms of communication are goal oriented; they are used to manipulate the viewers or listeners’ emotions not for the sole aim of entertainment but designed to achieve their persuasive goal of selling goods and services. The covid 19 outbreak had a big impact on several industries and the banking sector is not an exception. It is an undeniable fact that current advertising landscape poses a challenge to agencies, all round the world; hence businesses can still experience great result with digital advertising values for those who stay at home. Thus, the problem still remains that people do not look beyond the fascinating coated language, images, colour, gestures, and facial expression among others which have in –depth meaning. This paper investigates the different multimodal elements employed by Banks in the advertisement of their products and services on Facebook. Five screen-shot advertisements of five banks from Facebook were sampled and subjected to descriptive analysis. The Banks are, Access Bank, United Bank for Africa (UBA), First City Monument Bank (FCMB), First Bank of Nigeria and Guarantee Trust Bank (GT). The study is hinged on Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) theoretical approach to multimodal discourse which is heavily anchored on the systemic functional linguistic orientation of Halliday’s (1975) view of language as a social semiotic inspired studies on multimodal socio semiotic. The analysis revealed that bank advertisements are characterized by verbal and visual resources which include images, bold prints, capitalization, gothic writing, figures of speech, phrases, lexical acronym, quotes, punctuation marks and other graphological devices. It also revealed that colour, gesture, facial expression among others is also significant for meaning making of online Bank adverts. The paper concludes that some of these multimodal elements are embedded in the advert and they have persuasive effects on the audience even during the lock down situation.

A Study on the Persuasive Function of Metadiscourse in Hotel Responses to Negative Reviews on TripAdvisor

With the flourishing of tourism, more and more travelers tend to look at reviews on travel websites before booking accommodations. To minimize the possible unfavorable influence generated by negative reviews on websites, hotels tend to provide persuasive responses to negative reviews. Metadiscourse resource, as a linguistic resource, can be possibly used for such persuasive purpose in hotel responses to negative reviews. Taking TripAdvisor, one popular global travel website based in America, as an example, the present study explores the types of metadiscourse used in hotel responses to negative reviews and their role in achieving specific persuasive goals. 200 English responses to negative reviews from 50 hotels at the top five destinations were collected and analyzed. Metadiscourse markers were identified and located with the help of AntConc 3.5.9 (Windows) 2020 and Microsoft Word. The results show that nine types of metadiscourse resources are used in hotel responses to negative reviews on TripAdvisor, and interactional metadiscourse markers are more frequently adopted than interactive ones. Furthermore, it is found that metadiscourse markers can help achieve persuasive goals such as restoring the damaged reputation, winning trust, and enhancing rapport. This research complements the study on metadiscourse by looking at it in the genre of review response and explores the practicality of Aristotle’s three rhetorical means of persuasion in explaining the persuasive functions in business discourse. Hopefully, this study will spire hotels to take advantage of different types of metadiscourse resources in their attempt to achieve persuasive goals in their responses to negative reviews.

Online explainer videos: Features, benefits, and effects

Explainer videos are short films that explain abstract concepts and relationships, usually in an educational context. They apply storytelling techniques and focus on relevant facts using different visualizations. However, when reviewing the literature, it becomes evident that there is no universally applied definition for explainer videos and no consistent categorization. The vast majority of studies investigate explainer videos as learning tools, although many explainer videos follow persuasive goals. There are very little studies on the persuasiveness, which is problematic because explainer videos appear to be more than an important learning or teaching tool; rather, they are an activistic tool for promoting scientific topics and are a crucial marketing measure. In particular, in the context of science communication, it appears essential to investigate the impact on attitude and behavioral outcomes because there are numerous high-reach videos on YouTube that contradict scientific consensus. At the same time, explainer videos apply storytelling techniques, an informal communication style, and combine an off-voiceover with clear animations, which might lead to eased processing fluency and a positive experience, fostering persuasive outcomes. This mini review elaborates on these research gaps and compiles the state of research on explainer videos, with a focus on persuasive effects in informal settings, drawing on concepts from (science) communication and education.

A Pragmatic Account of the Weak Evidence Effect

Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be taken at face value. How should listeners account for a speaker's "hidden agenda" when incorporating new information? Here, we extend recent probabilistic models of recursive social reasoning to allow for persuasive goals and show that our model provides a pragmatic account for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, this model predicts a systematic relationship between belief updates and expectations about the information source: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers are expected to act under persuasive goals and prefer the strongest evidence. We introduce a simple experimental paradigm called the Stick Contest to measure the extent to which the weak evidence effect depends on speaker expectations, and show that a pragmatic listener model accounts for the empirical data better than alternative models. Our findings suggest further avenues for rational models of social reasoning to illuminate classical decision-making phenomena.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Antony’s Oration in Julius Caesar

The present study attempts a pragmatic analysis of Antony’s famous oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It aims to identify which speech acts were employed in this oration for the end of achieving a high level of persuasion and, hence, characterizing Antony’s peculiar persuasive style. To achieve this objective, the study adopts a pragmatic analysis utilizing the speech act theory whereby all speech acts uttered by Antony were hand-picked and collated to represent the data of the study. In the analysis of the data, Searle’s (1969) model for categorizing speech acts was adopted to best reflect the speech acts that helped exhibiting the persuasive intent of the writer. Leech’s (1983) politeness principles are adopted to show how polite the characters to each other. The finding of the study shows that the role of speech acts for persuasive goals was vital. It can be concluded that speech acts such as declarations, commissives, directives, etc., were all employed to achieve this rhetorical intention, however, the speech acts of representative were the most significant to portray Antony’s peculiar persuasive style.

Two Narratives about Kosovo’s Political Friends: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Articles in Two Newspapers

This article analyzes the portrayal of the USA and NATO as Kosovo’s friends in the Kosovan media discourse. The research will use the Critical Discourse Analysis based on the model by Van Dijk to demonstrate the production and continuity of the friendship discourse in the Kosovan media. Two daily media outlets are analyzed: Koha Ditore and Epoka e Re, focusing on the strategies used to construct the image of Kosovo’s friends for the countries that have supported the independence of the new state of Kosovo. The ideological framing of the friendship discourse is pointed out as the dominant topic in these two mainstream newspapers, but on the other hand, the papers emphasize two different perspectives of using the discourse of friendship, which are adjusted to the editorial policies and persuasive goals of the respective papers.

The Importance of Cultural Context in Analyzing the Discourse of Seller-Buyer Interaction

The study represents everyday life struggle in which language is considered as a problem-solving process. The current study is an attempt to investigate Mosuli cultural and Islamic traditions as a crucial factor for explaining linguistic formulas used by maneuvers in seller-buyer interaction. It also investigates the socio-linguistic variables and their effect on sequential organization, the types and more frequent acts in seller- buyer interaction and to see what are the specific choices of speech, style and the most frequent acts. It is found that the cultural context is an effective factor in understanding and analyzing the linguistic utterances as acts which represents strategies for pricing and purchasing and that speech acts reflect the social and cultural traditions related to language. Social and Islamic traditions as generosity and hospitality are deeply rooted in the Mosuli society. Moreover, sellers and buyers avoid in most cases threatening the negative face to reach their goal of persuasion. Adopting Sinclair-Coulthard's model(1975), the study has come up with a set of conclusions among which : understanding the cultural context is crucial for successful performance of selling buying strategies, speech acts and addressing forms help in accomplishing the negotiation process; also speech acts as strategies are heavily used to achieve the goal of interlocutors in Mosuli society.

Identifying Insincere and Sincere Bias through Post-Report Interactions

ABSTRACT Advisors frequently have an interest in the decisions their advisees make, forcing advisees to distinguish their advisors' unbiased beliefs from their self-interested bias. This task is likely to be especially hard when psychological forces distort advisors' beliefs to make some of their bias sincerely held. In our first experiment, we show that advisors bias both their recommendations and their own actions toward their persuasion goal, and that advisees are better at distinguishing between the unbiased, sincerely biased, and insincerely biased parts of their advisor's recommendation when they meet face-to-face to discuss, compared with when they receive only a written recommendation. Our second experiment shows that advisees distinguish their advisor's bias from their advisor's unbiased beliefs more accurately when the advisors are asked to provide fact-based information about their own actions. Both experiments show that post-report interactions are more helpful for identifying insincere bias than sincere bias. Data Availability: All raw data (excluding identifiable information), data processing code for tabulated analyses, and full experimental materials are available from the authors.

“US” AND “THEM” IN THINGS FALL APART BY CHINUA ACHEBE: A CRITICAL FUNCTIONAL APPROACH OF OTHERING

“Us” and “them” or othering often brings about world’s most feared phenomenon, xenophobia. This qualitative study purposes to disclose attitudinal strategies used in Chinua Achebe’s “things Fall Apart”. An excerpt from it was analysed through the “APPRAISAL”, especially the “ATTITUDE”, and ‘PERIODICITY” theories. Results reveal that “us” is framed with 4 (+) values and only 2 in (-) while “them” is constructed through only 1 (+) value and 3 (-). The vast majority of the attitudinal strategies used is “Jdg.”, occurring 7 times making up 70%. The other which emerges is “Apr.” which appears only 3 times and contributes 30%. As commonly held, “us” is narrated in more favors and fewer negatives and “them” in the opposite way to achieve planned hidden goals of persuasion.

Semantik Analisis Tagline Di Instagram Untuk Mempromosikan Pariwisata MICE (Studi Kasus: Akun Bisnis Phenom Event)

The study, entitled "Semantic Analysis of Tagline on Instagram to Promote MICE Tourism (Study Case: Phenom Event)", focuses on the meaning of the English tagline found in the event organizer Instagram’s advertisements. This study aims to identify, analyze, and describe the types of meanings and implicature factors in the English tagline. Data were collected from several English taglines posted on Instagram and in analyzing the data, the writer used Leech's (1974) theory about two types of meaning and Palmer's theory about the meaning aspect (1976). The two types of meaning are conceptual (denotative) and associative meanings which are divided into six subtypes: connotative, social, affective, collocative, reflective, and thematic. Palmer (1976) distinguishes aspects of meaning into four types, namely aspects of sense (sense), aspects of feeling (feeling), aspects of tone (tone) and aspects of purpose (intention). The results showed that the types of sentence meanings in the tagline contained 5 conceptual meanings (denotative), 22 connotative meanings, and 4 affective meanings. The results also showed that the aspect of the meaning of persuasive goals was mostly used in tagline’s posts on Instagram. The factors that affected implicature were intention and path factors. The tagline is used as a media to increase brand awareness and marketing strategies by using short, concise, and effective writing. Keywords: Semantic Analysis, Tagline, Instagram, Tourism of MICE

How Can Modifications of Meaning Influence Argumentation? The Concept and Typology of Semantic Arguments

The aim of this article is to show how modifications of meaning can influence argumentation. I present the basic concept of so-called ‘semantic argumentation,’ its definition, and its different variants. I analyse the various kinds of argument in which meanings of terms are modified in support of a persuasive goal. The analysis of different semantic arguments reveals certain structures and patterns that are needed to construct a typology of such arguments. I thus outline a basic concept of argumentation based on modifications of meaning, before presenting various examples of such arguments together with an analysis of their structures, and then, finally, constructing a typology for them.

Potenzialità glottodidattiche della comunicazione pubblicitaria

The aim of the present article is to shed the light on educational aspects which can be obtained by the exploration of an authentic, advertising material. The analysis attempts to demonstrate how communicative and linguistic characteristics, argumentative patterns, rhetorical figures and cultural aspects, which constitute the complex structure which is advertising message, convey values, stereotypes, social and linguistic tendencies. All of the above are conceived in order to complete the goals of persuasion. For the teacher, it is a rich, authentic and precious resource which gives the student the opportunity to extend his abilities and skills, to face and approach a new, linguistic and cultural context.

OS PROCESSOS METONÍMICOS EM PUBLICIDADE VERBO-VISUAL SOB ENFOQUE DA LINGUÍSTICA CRÍTICA E DA MULTIMODALIDADE

RESUMO A publicidade tem sido representada como um continuum de funções, flutuando entre informação e manipulação, frequentemente recorrendo à comunicação implícita. Pesquisas mostram que, nesse domínio, é crucial a orientação em direção ao leitor para assegurar objetivos retóricos de persuasão. Assim, diferentes pesquisas dedicam-se à linguagem e à comunicação na publicidade, analisando o uso de estratégias de comunicação, tais como, a personificação por meio de pronomes, a intertextualidade e estratégias persuasivas de suavização por meio da modalização (hedges). Em termos do discurso publicitário, faz-se necessário ir além do uso de adjetivos e expressões explícitas, para entender que a persuasão age também na subjacência do texto e por meio de recursos imagéticos. O objetivo deste artigo é examinar, anúncios de grandes instituições financeiras veiculados em diferentes mídias, como televisão, jornais, revistas e internet para identificar a contribuição dos processos metonímicos na persuasão que percorre o gênero publicitário. Para que os objetivos sejam alcançados, as análises partem dos microelementos até atingir os macroaspectos, onde as formas linguísticas e os atos de imagem agem em conjunto para transmissão de aspectos ideológicos e hegemônicos. Além disso, as análises contam com as teorias de Halliday (1994), Kress e van Leeuwen (1996; 2006), Feng (2017) e Fairclough (1994; 1995). Os resultados indicam que, os anúncios apresentam um alto nível de informalidade e situações rotineiras. Por outro lado, as análises baseadas nos processos metonímicos demonstram os caminhos e técnicas usadas na produção dos anúncios na busca de persuadir e vender os produtos.