Resumen de Linguistic choices in persuasive discourse: Preliminary analysis of self-reference, positive polarity and sentence construction
The present paper will examine linguistic choices in successful persuasive discourse. In this regard, morphological, lexical and syntactic features of discourse will be analysed: personal pronouns, positive-polarity items and sentence construction, respectively. The language tokens under analysis are the speeches by two female participants in TV show Dragons' Den. The methodology followed in this paper is quantitative. By using NVivo (R) software, both interventions are coded according to the three linguistic variables aforementioned (i.e. personal pronouns, number of positive-polarity lexical items and type of syntactic sentence). NVivo (R) measures the total number of references of each token analysed, 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. In addition, a frequent use of positive polarity lexical items is characteristic of persuasive discourse. Finally, syntax in effective persuasive discourse is simpler and repetitive: structured and cyclical monologues are more persuasive. Socially constructed discourse is successful as they include all the agents involved: speaker, audience and context. Under a socio-constructivist framework, the building of a persuasive discourse initiates with the speaker themselves.
