Book chapter
Коммуникативно-прагматическое своеобразие публичной речи как персуазивного феномена
In book
This book brings together academics and practitioners from a range of disciplines from more than twenty countries to reflect on the growing importance of transparency, power and control in our international community and how these concerns and ideas have been examined, used and interpreted in a range of national and international contexts. Contributors explore these issues from a range of overlapping concerns and perspectives, such as semiotic, sociolinguistic, psychological, philosophical, and visual in diverse socio-political, administrative, institutional, as well as legal contexts.
The collection examines the ways in which 'actors' in our society - legislators, politicians, activists, and artists - have provoked public discourses to confront these issues.
Human behaviour is affected by various forms of persuasion. The general persuasive effect of high expertise of the communicator, often referred to as ’expert power’, is well documented. We found that a single exposure to a combination of an expert and an object leads to a long-lasting positive effect on memory for and attitude towards the object. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we probed the neural processes predicting these behavioural effects. Expert context was associated with distributed left-lateralized brain activity in prefrontal and temporal cortices related to active semantic elaboration. Furthermore, experts enhanced subsequent memory effects in the medial temporal lobe (i.e. in hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus) involved in memory formation. Experts also affected subsequent attitude effects in the caudate nucleus involved in trustful behaviour, reward processing and learning. These results may suggest that the persuasive effect of experts is mediated by modulation of caudate activity resulting in a re-evaluation of the object in terms of its perceived value. Results extend our view of the functional role of the dorsal striatum in social interaction and enable us to make the first steps toward a neuroscientific model of persuasion.
The article focuses on the narrative as a rhetoric strategy and a crucial interdisciplinary phenomenon connecting language, mind, culture and political impact. As a case study Victory speech-2012 and Inaugural speech-2013 by Barack Obama are taken. The examples demonstrate that narrative in the political discourse of Obama goes back to the rhetoric of religious parable. Key words: narrative, parable, conceptual metaphor, rhetoric strategies, political discourse, basic values.
The article argues that political texts should be view as both reflecting current social and political reality and cunstructing it at the same time through what can be called biased interpretations. The article analyses a number of language choices in political texts that can lead to construction of biased interpretations and add to creation of so called political myths.
This book addresses a subject that can in the broadest sense be stated as interplay of language and ideology in process of instantiating historical knowledge in texts of political significance. The aim of the present volume is to discuss how history is recontextualized in national political discourse in the framework of two basic strategies of in-group and out-group categorization and biased representation of historical facts. It is contended that such recontextualization leads to what can be described as blending of national political discourse with a nationalistic one.
The evidence for the above contention is provided through linguistic analysis of three chunks of texts.
First, American presidential rhetoric spanning the last 50 years of history was analyzed. This part of the analysis suggests that a productive way to analyze the ‘enemy construction’ strategy seen as one of the key strategies of the discourse of the New World Order is to analyze it in a broader historic perspective, viz. as taking over the same principles, which defined the discourse of the Cold War. The ‘enemy construction’ strategy in both discourses is analyzed as resting on logic of binarism of the classical Us and Them opposition. Thus, it is contended that textual actualization of the ‘enemy’ is the projection of the basic category of the ‘other’ which is perpetuated in the political discourse and gets lexicalized differently depending on the text’s instantiating a particular order of discourse and the ideology informing it.
Second, a chunk of texts produced by those claiming to be professional historians has been addressed to see how national historical discourse is reinstantiated vis-à-vis a newly acquired national identity. An example of such discourse would be texts by Ukrainian historians writing on Great Patriotic War/World War II.
Third, texts of public figures, state leaders among them, instantiating post-Soviet geopolitical situation in the Caucasus, in particular, tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh were looked into. The tension aggravated with unresolved conflicts, involvement of both Russia and the USA, results in this material being a valuable source for pinpointing linguistic patterns of historical and political discourse in general and patterns indicative of national historical discourse transforming into nationalistic discourse, in particular.
Discourse analysis is neither meant to substitute historical analysis, nor claims that all historical permutations are of discursive nature solely. Instead, we see the role of discourse analysis in placing a broader question: To what extent that which has really happened is displaced by its recontextualization in discourse, i.e. by its description? Since any conflict is always closely tied with conflicting values the question can be restated as: To what extent in such historical accounts accurate rendition is displaced with evaluation and appraisal? What comes first: the unresolved issues themselves or discursive practice perpetuating those issues? In other words, is it the conflict itself or the conflict of conflicting textual descriptions?
One way or the other, historical representations are not static; they are flexible and more than prone to distortion when values come into play. Reinventing the history to mesh with a new national identity is number one example. A clash of different political perspectives is a clash of different historical descriptions. And in this clash a power-wielding social agent has the power to reinterpret the history that will fit their political narrative with other interpretations outlawed and rendered unhistorical.
In the meantime, the true power of history as a field of study and an academic discipline should be seen in presenting multiple interpretations of phenomena in question with these interpretations being mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive. In which lies the real power and the mission of all the humanities.
Celebrity endorsement is omnipresent. However, despite its prevalence, it is unclear why celebrities are more persuasive than (equally attractive) non-famous endorsers. The present study investigates which processes underlie the effect of fame on product memory and purchase intention by the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging methods. We find an increase in activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) underlying the processing of celebrity–product pairings. This finding suggests that the effectiveness of celebrities stems from a transfer of positive affect from celebrity to product. Additional neuroimaging results indicate that this positive affect is elicited by the spontaneous retrieval of explicit memories associated with the celebrity endorser. Also, we demonstrate that neither the activation of implicit memories of earlier exposures nor an increase in attentional processing is essential for a celebrity advertisement to be effective. By explaining the neural mechanism of fame, our results illustrate how neuroscience may contribute to a better understanding of consumer behavior.
In this article we present the results of research into discourse features characterising a lexico-semantic group of synonyms denoting a human being: human being, person, individual, personality and man. The main tool for analysis was language corpora, which made it possible not only to determine more precisely the functional styles the lexemes tend to be used in, but also to describe thematic characteristics of the texts in which the analysed lexical units show the highest frequency of use