Persuasion

Persuasion is a form of goal‐oriented and audience‐targeted use of language. In the Greco‐Roman tradition, persuasion was the object of rhetoric, understood both as the practice of persuasive argumentation (rhetorica utens) and as the study of the compositional structure of effective public speaking (rhetorica docens). In a broader and more contemporary perspective, persuasion can be pursued in a variety of discursive genres and social settings and entails the deployment of language and other semiotic resources to affect the audience, inducing attitudes and behaviors. Persuasion is inherently appellative, performative, and poetic, that is, it presupposes an audience, it requires a certain degree of reflexivity, and it entails some form of poetic projection. Linguistic anthropological research has demonstrated how, far from being a clear‐cut notion, persuasion is a complex metapragmatic construct, embedded in culturally and historically specific theories of mind, action, and intention, and connected to local ideologies of language and meaning.