Positive Polarity and Sentence Construction’ by Rosa Muñoz-Luna. The author examines language in successful persuasive discourse. In particular, she analyses morphological, lexical and syntactic features, namely, the use of pronouns (for self-reference), positive polarity adjectives, and sentence construction. By using NVivo® software, Muñoz-Luna examines two speeches by female participants in TV show Dragons’ Den. As the author shows, NVivo® measures the total number of references of each token analysed (personal pronouns, positive adjectives and sentence length), and then provides relative parameters which indicate the degree of frequency of an item over the rest in a particular context. Results show that more persuasive oral discourse contains a higher amount of self-references to the speaker, a frequent use of positive polarity items and short and balanced sentences.
‘Digital Storytelling and the Art of the Emotional Appeal: The Case of Despite My Fears’ by Isabel Alonso-Belmonte. Alonso-Belmonte explores the multimodal expression of emotions in a digital story title Despite My Fears. By drawing on a combination of different functionally-oriented approaches to the study of multimodal texts, this chapter draws attention to the digital narrator’s conscious use of multimodal resources to generate empathy, to emotionally touch the audience and eventually, to send a message of empowerment and success. Results show that positive emotions are maximised over negative ones by the use of specific visual and aural resources which reinforce, compare and clarify the verbal message. Findings are discussed in relation with more recent research on digital narratives.
The volume makes manifest that evaluative, emotive and persuasive strategies are pervasive in many linguistic manifestations and are implemented by an ample spectrum of linguistic and non-linguistic devices. No single methodological framework, nor a definite set of linguistic devices can account in isolation for what makes a given discourse sample persuasive; thus, a miscellanea of discursive approaches like the one offered in this volume can shed some light of what contributes to the persuasion of a text and to what extend persuasion is achieved by evaluation and/or other means.
Evaluation, emotion and persuasion, as well as their interplay, are examined through the prism of theoretical frameworks with a vast and well-established research tradition, such as the Appraisal Framework, Functional Linguistics, or Critical Discourse Analysis. Furthermore, the analyses cover three key linguistic levels: morphology, syntax and discourse as a whole, which are analyzed empirically in data samples gathered from real and diverse socio-cultural settings.
Acknowledgements
The present study was financially supported by a grant (ID No: FFI2013-47792-C2-2-P). This chapter is part of the long-term research Project ‘EMOtion and language at work’: The discursive emotive/evaluative FUNction in different texts and contexts within corporate and institutional work: PROject PERsuasion (EMOFUN-DETT: PROPER).
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