Emerging Trends in the Register of Persuasion Considering Appraisal in English

Autori

DOI:

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

Parole chiave:

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

Abstract

Questo articolo discute le recenti tendenze che riguardano il registro della persuasione in inglese e come si applicano a una raccolta di testi (dataset) generati da sistemi basati sull'intelligenza artificiale (IA). Tali tendenze sono legate a differenze culturali e nuove disponibilita' delle tecnologiche digitali, che hanno anche cambiato le pratiche sociali e professionali. A questo scopo, in primo luogo ho discusso i concetti di costruzione grammaticale e lessicale della presa di posizione ("stance"), includendo forme implicite e esplicite, dirette e indirette che impattano il registro della persuasione. Altri concetti che hanno impatto sulla persuasivita' sono il metatesto, meta-discorso e la distribuzione retorica. In secondo luogo, ho analizzato una raccolta di testi persuasivi generati da un sistema basato sull'AI e pubblicato per pubblico uso da Anthropic (2024). La metodologia utilizzata nell'analisi e' una versione adattata dell'appraisal system framework (ASF), il sistema della valutazione nella lingua inglese di Martin e White (2005), che prende in considerazione le applicazioni nell'analisi di testi promozionali (Pounds, 2011; Ho, 2021, 2022), istituzionali (Tupala, 2019), academici (Hood, 2010), e la ricerca sui sistemi complementari del discorso per esprimere opinioni e valutazioni (Biber et al., 2018). I risultati hanno rivelato che i tre gruppi di testi estratti dal set di dati di Anthropic presentano intervalli di frequenza delle parole non dissimili. Inoltre, il campione analizzato inverte il modello attestato come una tendenza recente in inglese di utilizzare prevalentemente valutazioni implicite, ma mantiene un altro modello attestato riguardo al grado di comunicazione in/diretta (ASF 'engagement' e 'judgment'). Infine, le categorie ASF di "atteggiamento", "graduazione" e "impegno" nel campione non deviano dalla funzione di propagare il metatesto iniziale, tuttavia, costruiscono sistematicamente prosodie semantiche di 'estremi' col risultato di persuadere in modo convincente e coinvolgente.

Biografia autore

  • 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.

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Pubblicato

2024-12-20

Fascicolo

Sezione

Articoli (sezione generale) - lingua e linguistica inglese