Exploring evaluative, emotive and persuasive strategies in discourse. AAVV

at Alcalá University (Spain), where she has taught since 1993 diverse subjects such discourse analysis, Systemic Function Linguistics, and, of late, argumentation and persuasion in English and their translation into Spanish. This latter subjects have been informed by the research project she directs entitled Emotion and Language ‘at Work’: The Discursive Emotive/Evaluative Function in Different Texts and Contexts within the Corporate and Institutional Work: Project Persuasion (Reference FFI2013-47792-C2-2P), granted by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad). Her latest publications are “The evaluative function of cohesive devices in three political texts” (De Gruyter Mouton, 2013, co-authored with Ana Belén Cabrejas-Peñuelas), “Positive self-evaluation versus negative other-evaluation in the political genre of pre-election debates” (Discourse & Society, 2014), “Enforcing gender in adolescents via directives in teenzines: A contrastive view in English and Spanish” (Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2014), “The use of metaphor and evaluation as discourse strategies in pre-electoral debates: Just about winning votes” (John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2016), “The Internet as a pedagogical tool in the writing process: A research-based approach” (Springer, 2018, co-authored with Ana Belén Cabrejas-Peñuelas), “Abstract nouns as metadiscursive shells in academic discourse” (Revista Caplletra, 2018) and “Engagement in business persuasive discourse: The elevator pitch” (John Benjamins, under review).

      BRUNO ECHAURI GALVÁN is a lecturer in the Modern Philology Department at the University of Alcalá. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in Translation Studies. His research interests encompass different aspects of this field such as translation and interpreting in mental health and health care settings, or intersemiotic translation.

      ANTONIO GARCÍA-GÓMEZ is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (Spain) where he teaches discourse analysis and functional linguistics. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His expertise lies mainly in discourse analysis and discursive psychology. Professor García-Gómez’s main and most developed research interest is conflict talk. A main strand of his research has focused on the pragma-discursive strategies employed in conflictual episodes in talk show interaction. Other current research interests include gender, identity and language use in new media. He has published numerous articles and authored two books. Professor García-Gómez was an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London (Department of Psychology), and presents regularly at conferences across Spain and Europe. His latest publications are “Televised entrepreneurial discourse: Conversational structure and compliance gaining strategies” (Studies in Media and Communication, 2017) and “Dragons’ Den: Enacting Persuasion in Reality Television” (Discourse, Context and Media, forthcoming 2018).

      MARÍA JOSÉ GARCÍA VIZCAÍNO is Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Translation and Interpreting in Spanish at Montclair State University (MSU). She teaches Specialized Translation and Negotiation Skills in Spanish at MSU. Her current lines of research are Linguistics, Translation, and Advertising. Dr. García Vizcaíno also works in the field of Transcreation: the adaptation and recreation of both visual and textual contents taking into account the sociocultural nuances of the target audience and language of a particular market.

      SILVIA MOLINA PLAZA is Senior Lecturer at the Technical University of Madrid where she is currently teaching at the Department of Applied Linguistics to Science and Technology. She has gained recognition for eighteen years of quality research. Her research has focused on the translation from English to Spanish, contrastive analysis (modality and collocations), Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis applied to different genres in numerous book chapters, articles, papers.

      ROSA MUÑOZ LUNA completed her BA degree on English Philology at the University of Málaga (2006), and her BA degrees on Education and Psychopedagogy at the University of Salamanca (2012). During a temporary stay at the University of Exeter (England), she obtained a Master in TESOL, and from that moment onwards English teaching and discourse analysis became her fields of expertise. She is currently working as Associate Professor at the University of Málaga. She has published in JCR international journals such as Porta Linguarum, Plos One and Resla.

      JOAQUÍN PRIMO-PACHECO is a PhD candidate at the University of Valencia. He holds a BA in English Philology and an MA in Language and Literature Research from the same university. His several research interests span across different fields, including discourse analysis, film and television studies, corpus linguistics, gender and queer studies, literary stylistics and TEFL.

       Exploring Evaluative, Emotive and Persuasive Strategies in Discourse: Introductory Remarks

      ANTONIO GARCÍA-GÓMEZ & MERCEDES DÍEZ-PRADOS

      Universidad de Alcalá

      In the present volume, we delve into three discourse functions that have deemed of great interest for scholars through time: evaluation, emotion and persuasion. Our present intent is to move one step forward and see how they are intimately intertwined. Within the evaluative function of language, rational and emotional persuasion plays an important role; as Bamford (2007: 138) states, “evaluation is very persuasive”. Similarly, types of discourse such as political and advertising, which are eminently persuasive (Cockcroft et al. 2013) because their main function is to produce a change in the addressor’s beliefs (Pullman, 2013: xx), are overloaded with evaluation and strong emotions. More specifically, persuasion in these types of discourse is manifested and implemented via evaluative and emotive devices, since they provide a positive self-evaluation and negative other-evaluation or depreciation (see, for example, Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados, 2014). These devices aim to persuade the audience to “buy” what they are trying to sell, be it a product or an idea, in contrast with what their opponents have to offer. It may even be claimed that evaluation is intrinsically persuasive, since the mere manifestation of appraisal involves a statement of the addresser’s beliefs with the explicit or implicit desire to make the addressee share his/her valuation (i.e. to persuade him/her), regardless of the actual effect produced.

      The description of the language functions of evaluation, emotion and persuasion will be carried out in this volume through the multimodal analysis of real texts and discursive situations in which English or Spanish is spoken, without forgetting the so-called e-communication, given the great impact of these new technologies on the present global society. The papers in the present volume explore the discursive manifestations of evaluation, emotion and persuasion and the extent to which these three phenomena can be conceived separately or whether each of them is the consequence or effect of the other(s). The purpose of persuasion is to influence somehow on the reader’s value system (García-Gómez 2007) and what the papers in this volume explore is how this is carried out by using evaluative and emotive discourse. In addition to this, the present volume addresses those three language functions and their interplay in multiple discourse genres (i.e. business pitches, political debates, media discourse, fiction, social networks) that represent multiple discursive situations.

      Authors depart from the premise that an evaluative process underlies every persuasive act, in the sense that trying to persuade (“the art of getting what you want”, Lakhani, 2005) implies attempting to change somebody else’s beliefs, points of view or convictions. In so doing, the persuader is presenting his/her reality as a more valid option than that of the receptor and, thus, is inviting him/her to reconsider his/her worldview. In addition, rational thoughts have been highly valued in the study of persuasive communication in the literature; however, persuasion also goes hand-in-hand with the way(s) words appeal to the audience’s emotions.

      There is no doubt that rational and emotional persuasion is at the heart of argumentative strategies such as the resort to the principles of authority, novelty, modernity, exclusiveness or internationalization (Santiago Guervós, 2012) and is manifested at all linguistic levels: phonetics (e.g. intonation, stress), morphology (e.g. suffixes, pronouns), syntax (e.g. evasive answers, rhetorical questions), lexis (e.g. argot, lexical