The Language of Persuasion in Politics

The Language of Persuasion in Politics
Author: Alan Partington
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-09-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351710109

This accessible introductory textbook looks at the modern relationship between politicians, the press and the public through the language they employ, with extensive coverage of key topics including: ‘spin’, ‘spin control’ and ‘image’ politics models of persuasion: authority, contrast, association pseudo-logical and ‘post-truth’ arguments political interviewing: difficult questions, difficult answers metaphors and metonymy rhetorical figures humour, irony and satire Extracts from speeches, soundbites, newspapers and blogs, interviews, press conferences, election slogans, social media and satires are used to provide the reader with the tools to discover the beliefs, character and hidden strategies of the would-be persuader, as well as the counter-strategies of their targets. This book demonstrates how the study of language use can help us appreciate, exploit and protect ourselves from the art of persuasion. With a wide variety of practical examples on both recent issues and historically significant ones, every topic is complemented with guiding tasks, queries and exercises with keys and commentaries at the end of each unit. This is the ideal textbook for all introductory courses on language and politics, media language, rhetoric and persuasion, discourse studies and related areas.

Understanding Political Persuasion: Linguistic and Rhetorical Analysis

Understanding Political Persuasion: Linguistic and Rhetorical Analysis
Author: Douglas Mark Ponton
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1622738772

This book builds on the consolidated research field of Political Discourse Analysis and attempts to provide an introduction suitable for adoption amongst a readership wishing to understand some of the principles underlying such research, and above all to appreciate how the tools of discourse analysis might be applied to actual texts. It summarises some of the work that has been done in this field by authorities such as Halliday, Fairclough, Wodak, Chilton, Van Dijk, Martin, Van Leeuwen and others to provide the would-be analyst with practical ideas for their own research. Naturally, this would not be the first time that such a handbook or introductory reference book has been proposed. Fairclough himself recently produced one; however, his work, simply entitled Political Discourse Analysis, inevitably includes theoretical insights from his own research. The beginning analyst can, at times, experience a sense of bewilderment at the mass of theoretical writing in linguistics, in the search for some practical, usable tools. I explain a variety of such tools, demonstrating their usefulness in application to the analysis of a number of political speeches, from different historical periods and diverse social contexts. The author’s hope is that would-be students of political rhetoric, of whatever level and from a variety of research areas, will be able to pick up this book and find tools and techniques that will assist them in actual work on texts. Naturally, it is also hoped that they will be inspired to follow up the suggestions for further reading which they will find in the bibliography.

Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism

Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism
Author: Ellen Susan Peel
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814209103

An addition to the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series, Peel's book addresses how feminist utopian narratives attempt to persuade readers to adopt certain beliefs. Using three feminist utopian novels as her main examples, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five by Doris Lessing; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, Peel examines how belief-bridging and protean metaphor in these works persuade readers. Literary persuasion, often dismissed as propaganda, in fact works in subtle and profound ways. The book presents major techniques by which narrative literature exercises this sophisticated influence on beliefs. Ultimately concluding that the pragmatic works better than the static in utopian feminism, Peel shows how, in novels such as those under discussion, the narrative techniques support pragmatism. Inquiring how narrative form can shape political belief by affecting readers' responses, the author integrates topics that are rarely combined. The book investigates three theoretical issues: utopian belief, distinguishing the perfectionism of the static from the vitality of the pragmatic and showing how the latter creates narrative energy; the persuasive process, tracing narrative form and asking how implied readers match real ones and how readers are swayed by belief-bridging and protean metaphor; and feminist belief, a nuanced definition that accounts both for what links feminists and what makes them diverse. Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism explores the rhetorical and ethical power of narrative literature.

Persuasion in Public Discourse

Persuasion in Public Discourse
Author: Jana Pelclová
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-08-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027263590

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.

Political Persuasion and Attitude Change

Political Persuasion and Attitude Change
Author: Diana Carole Mutz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1996
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780472065554

Introduces and defines a new field of research on the way political attitudes are influenced and changed

The Language of Politics

The Language of Politics
Author: Michael L. Geis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1461247144

This study is the second of two I have done concerning how language is used to persuade others to believe things and to do things. The first, published by Aca demic Press, was The Language of Television Advertising, and was concerned with how advertisers use language in their efforts to sell products and services and how consumers could be expected to understand it. In this study, the focus is on how politicians use language to win elections and get others to accept their policies and programs and on how journalists report the suasive efforts of politicans. I combine an interest in the language of political reporting with an interest in the language of politics for a number of reasons. First, much of the suasive rhetoric of politicians is filtered through the minds of political journalists before it reaches the citizenry, and we can be reasonably sure that this rhetoric does not come out the way it went in. Second, the press plays a significant role in deter mining the nation's political agenda through its choices of what issues will be presented to the public, how these issues will be presented, and which voices will be heard speaking out on these issues. Third, political reporting can be suasive in effect, if not in intent, and it will be useful, I think, to understand how this is so.

The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion

The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion
Author: Elizabeth Suhay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 912
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190860839

Elections are the means by which democratic nations determine their leaders, and communication in the context of elections has the potential to shape people's beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Thus, electoral persuasion is one of the most important political processes in any nation that regularly holds elections. Moreover, electoral persuasion encompasses not only what happens in an election but also what happens before and after, involving candidates, parties, interest groups, the media, and the voters themselves. This volume surveys the vast political science literature on this subject, emphasizing contemporary research and topics and encouraging cross-fertilization among research strands. A global roster of authors provides a broad examination of electoral persuasion, with international perspectives complementing deep coverage of U.S. politics. Major areas of coverage include: general models of political persuasion; persuasion by parties, candidates, and outside groups; media influence; interpersonal influence; electoral persuasion across contexts; and empirical methodologies for understanding electoral persuasion.

Persuasion Across Genres

Persuasion Across Genres
Author: Helena Halmari
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027253736

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.

Influence Is Your Superpower

Influence Is Your Superpower
Author: Zoe Chance
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1984854348

Rediscover the superpower that makes good things happen, from the professor behind Yale School of Management's most popular class “The new rules of persuasion for a better world.”—Charles Duhigg, author of the bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life. Influence doesn’t work the way you think because you don’t think the way you think. Move past common misconceptions—such as the idea that asking for more will make people dislike you—and understand why your go-to negotiation strategies are probably making you less influential. Discover the one thing that influences behavior more than anything else. Learn to cultivate charisma, negotiate comfortably and creatively, and spot manipulators before it’s too late. Along the way, you’ll meet alligators, skydivers, a mind reader in a gorilla costume, Jennifer Lawrence, Genghis Khan, and the man who saved the world by saying no. Influence Is Your Superpower will teach you how to transform your life, your organization, and perhaps even the course of history. It’s an ethical approach to influence that will make life better for everyone, starting with you.

Politicians and Rhetoric

Politicians and Rhetoric
Author: J. Charteris-Black
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2016-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230501702

This book analyzes the rhetoric of speeches by major British or American politicians and shows how metaphor is used systematically to create political myths of monsters, villains and heroes. Metaphors are shown to interact with other figures of speech to communicate subliminal meanings by drawing on the unconscious emotional association of words.