Emerging Trends in the Register of Persuasion Considering Appraisal in English

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2024.i24.1539

Keywords:

English language, English linguistics, Persuasive register, Appraisal in English, LLM-generated persuasive texts

Abstract

This paper discusses recent trends in the persuasion register in English. Such trends are linked to cultural differences and technological affordances, which also have an impact on social and professional practices (Bai et al. 2023; Matz et al. 2024; Kapantai et al. 2021). To this purpose, I first discuss the key concepts related to persuasive writing and their link to appraisal in English. Then, I focus on a sample of the most persuasive AI-generated writing extracted from a dataset released by Anthropic (Durmus et al. 2024) and available online. The methodology that drives this study is the appraisal system framework (ASF) by Martin and White (2005), the findings in ASF-based research on promotional texts (Pounds 2022; Ho 2021; 2011), institutional texts (Tupala 2019), academic texts (Hood 2010; 2006), and the research on complementary discourse systems for expressing stance and evaluation (Biber et al. 2019; 2018). The results show that the three groups of highly persuasive texts extracted from the Anthropic’s dataset present non-dissimilar word frequency ranges and a tendency towards the use of low-frequency lexis and appraisal resources. The application of the ASF demonstrates that the AI system Claude 3 Opus masters evaluation scales in English despite the well-documented inconsistencies of such systems in dealing with the numerical scales. The sample analyzed does not really follow the pattern of sparingly using appraisal resources while preferring invoked appraisal, which has been demonstrated to be a recent trend in the persuasion register. Nonetheless, it mostly maintains the proven culture-based recent trend regarding the scale of directness/indirectness (ASF Engagement). Finally, the ASF categories of Attitude, Graduation, and Engagement in the sample do not deviate from the attested function of propagating the meta-text/meta-discourse although with a caveat: they systematically construct semantic prosodies of extremes to persuade compellingly.

Author Biography

  • Anna Zanfei, University of Verona

    Anna Zanfei is an Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Verona, Italy. Her main research interests focus on discourse analysis and persuasive writing, including multimodal and AI-generated text. In 2012 she published Multimodal Persuasion and, in 2018, Antithetic Ideologies in the Negotiation of ‘the Other’: Annotating Discourses about Racial Discrimination in Terms of National Identity.

References

Akhtar, Mubashara, et. al. “Exploring the Numerical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis on Tabular Data.” Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023. Edited by Bouamor Houda, Juan Pino and Kalika Bali. Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023. 15391-15405.

Bai, Hui Mark, et al. “Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues.” Open Science (2023). https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/stakv. Last visited 05/11/2023.

Biber, Douglas. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad. Register, Genre, and Style. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Biber, Douglas, Jesse Egbert and Meixiu Zhang. “Lexis and Grammar as Complementary Discourse Systems for Expressing Stance and Evaluation.” Lexis and Grammar as Complementary Discourse Systems for Expressing Stance and Evaluation. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018. 197-222.

Dafouz-Milne, Emma. “The Pragmatic Role of Textual and Interpersonal Metadiscourse Markers in the Construction and Attainment of Persuasion: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Newspaper Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 40.1 (2008): 95-113.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), 1990-present. https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/. Last visited 22/04/2024.

Durmus, Esin, et al. “Measuring the Persuasiveness of Language Models.” Anthropic 9 April 2024. https://www.anthropic.com/news/measuring-model-persuasiveness. Last visited 09/04/ 2024.

El-Dakhs, Dina, Laila Mardini and Luftia Alhabbad. “The Persuasive Strategies in More and Less Prestigious Linguistics Journals: Focus on Research Article Abstracts.” Cogent Arts & Humanities 11.1 (2024): 2325760.

Facchinetti, Roberta, et al. News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012.

Fahnestock, Jeanne and Randy Allen Harris. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Farrelly Michael and Elena Seoane. “Democratization.” The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Edited by Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 392-401.

Hiltunen, Turo and Lucía Loureiro-Porto. “Democratization of Englishes: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches.” Language Sciences 79 (2020): 101275.

Ho, Nga-Ki Mavis. “Luxury Values Perceptions in Chinese and English: Deviation from National Cultures.” Journal of International Consumer Marketing 34.3 (2022): 255-269.

---. “Transcreation in Marketing: A Corpus-Based Study of Persuasion in Optional Shifts from English to Chinese.” Perspectives 29.3 (2021): 426-438.

Hood, Susan. Appraising Research: Evaluation in Academic Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

---. “The Persuasive Power of Prosodies: Radiating Values in Academic Writing.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5 (2006): 37-49.

Hyland, Ken. “Persuasion, Interaction and the Construction of Knowledge: Representing Self and Others in Research Writing.” International Journal of English Studies 8.2 (2008):1-23.

Kapantai, Eleni, et al. “A Systematic Literature Review on Disinformation: Toward A Unified Taxonomical Framework.” New Media & Society 23.5 (2021): 1301-1326.

Kotze, Haidee and Bertus van Rooy. “Democratisation in the South African Parliamentary Hansard? A Study of Change in Modal Auxiliaries.” Language Sciences 79 (2020): 101264.

Manca, Elena. Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.

Martin, James R. and Peter Robert R. White. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Matz, Sandra, et al. “The Potential of Generative AI for Personalized Persuasion at Scale.” Scientific Reports 14 (2024): 4692.

Pounds, Gabrina. “‘This Property Offers Much Character and Charm’: Evaluation in the Discourse of Online Property Advertising.” Text & Talk 31.2 (2011): 195-220.

Read, Jonathon and John Carroll. “Annotating expressions of Appraisal in English.” Lang Resources & Evaluation 46 (2012): 421-447.

Taboada, Maite and Jack Grieve. “Analyzing Appraisal Automatically.” Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text. Stanford, March 2004. 158-161.

Tupala, Mira. “Applying Quantitative Appraisal Analysis to the Study of Institutional Discourse: The Case of EU Migration Documents.” Functional linguistics 6.2 (2019): 1-17. https://functionallinguistics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40554-018-0067-7. Last visited 05/11/2023.

Vergaro, Carla. “Discourse Strategies of Italian and English Sales Promotion Letters.” English for Specific Purposes 23.2 (2004): 181-207.

Zibalas, Deividas and Jolanta Sinkuniene. “Rhetorical Structure of Promotional Genres: The Case of Research Article and Conference Abstracts.” Discourse and Interaction 12 (2019): 95-113.

Downloads

Published

2024-12-20

Issue

No. 24 (2024): Digital/Electronic Literature from the USA: Theories, Forms and Practices

Section

Articles (general section) - English language and linguistics

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Zanfei

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

 Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.
  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.