1 The Volume

This book brings together 13 contributions that were selected predominantly, but not exclusively, from the conference “Influence, Manipulation and Seduction. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Persuasive Language” conducted at the University of Basel in 2020. Taking place on the cusp of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the conference brought together researchers working on the topics that would become ever more prominent over the following three years. The online pivot skyrocketed the consumption of social media, which in turn created fertile ground for persuasive narratives affecting the social fabric of our lives (COVID-19 and antivaccine conspiracies, presidential conspiracism surrounding the 2020 US election that culminated in the storming of the Capitol building, and the disinformation campaigns and fake news surrounding current humanitarian crises). Post-conference developments also include the takeover of the Twitter/X social network by the billionaire Elon Musk, who proceeded to platform and amplify false claims from disinformation accounts and therefore contributed to malicious persuasive practices. While undoubtedly problematic in terms of overall impact of society and well-being, these changes make the present collection of work on persuasive discourses especially relevant and create an abundance of data for subsequent research.

The research papers in the volume are organized in three thematic blocks, bracketed by an introductory block that discusses the various understandings of the phenomenon of ‘persuasion’ and situates it in existing interdisciplinary research, and a concluding discussant chapter.

2 Language and Persuasion

How can we influence someone to act in a way they did not initially intend or change their views on an issue? Except for resorting to physical force, our primary tool is language. We use it to convince, persuade, cajole, nudge, or coax others into specific behaviors or mindsets. These are activities we engage in naturally during everyday social interactions. Words possess the power to shape and influence opinions, attitudes, and, consequently, behavior. The present book explores the role of language in these processes.

Discursive persuasion has piqued the curiosity of scholars across various branches of humanities. Since the time of Aristotle, persuasion has been conceptualized as comprising three fundamental elements: logos (the use of arguments), pathos (emotional involvement of the audience), and ethos (credibility of the speaker). However, the lack of clear definition and the challenges in operationalizing these constituent elements have led contemporary social science research to diverge significantly from the classical rhetorical approach.

To start with a definition, persuasion can be described as “the process of inducing a voluntary change in someone’s attitudes, beliefs or behaviour through the transmission of a message” (Schmidt & Kess, Reference Schmidt and Kess1986, p. 2; our emphasis). By emphasizing the role of the ‘message’ as the instrument of persuasion, this definition underscores that language stands as one of its foundational components. Consequently, it underscores the need for linguists to devote their attention to the examination of persuasion’s mechanisms and functions. The use of the phrase ‘voluntary change’ in this definition is also an important one, as it demarcates torture or extortion as outside the scope of persuasion. In a similar vein, the linguist Robin Lakoff (Reference Lakoff and Tannen1982, p. 28) understood persuasion as “an attempt or intention of one participant to change the behaviour, feelings, intentions, or viewpoint of another by [linguistic] communicative means” – pointing out that, for example, aiming a gun at someone’s head, while potentially effective, would not fall within the domain of discursive persuasion.

Lakoff further specifies that persuasive discourse consists in non-reciprocal attempts to affect others. This approach prompted the study of persuasion from the angle of social power, which has often been taken by Critical Discourse Analysis studies (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough2001; van Dijk, Reference Van Dijk2008). Van Dijk (Reference Van Dijk2008, p. 15) contends that institutions have a privileged position to persuade and imprint ideologies since they hold preferential access to public discourse. The participatory web and social media have been changing this balance of power, however, and now individual speakers can potentially reach millions of eyes and ears – a prerogative previously reserved for traditional mass media.

Traditionally, linguists have examined the mechanics of persuasive language within these institutionalized discourses. Given their inherent persuasiveness, it comes as no surprise that advertising (cf., for instance, Boyland et al., Reference Boyland, Harrold and Kirkham2011; Brierley, Reference Brierly2002; Fuertes-Olivera et al., Reference Fuertes-Olivera, Velasco-Sacristán, Arribas-Baño and Samaniego-Fernández2001; Geis, Reference Geis1982; Labrador et al., Reference Labrador, Ramón, Alaiz-Moretón and Sanjurio-González2014; Leech, Reference Leech1966) and politics (as observed, e.g., in works by Charteris-Black, Reference Charteris-Black2011; Joseph, Reference Joseph2006; Obeng, Reference Obeng1997; Partington & Taylor, Reference Partington and Taylor2018; Schäffner, Reference Schäffner and Trosborg1997) have been the focal points of scholarly exploration. However, the need to expand the study of persuasive language to other genres and domains, such as advice-giving, dating, or sales encounters, is apparent. The evolving technological and social landscape presents novel challenges in comprehending persuasiveness, prompting a previously uncharted approach from diverse linguistic perspectives. This edited volume aspires to bridge this gap by introducing fresh viewpoints, innovative methodologies, and contemporary datasets to the exploration of language and persuasion.

This introductory chapter to the edited volume sets out, first, to provide an overview of different approaches to persuasion and how they contribute to the research landscape of persuasive language, culminating in the main themes of manipulation, influence, and deception, also touching upon the notion of propaganda (cf. Jowett & O’Donnell, Reference Jowett and O’Donnell2006). Besides linguistic or linguistically informed approaches (e.g., Lakoff, Reference Lakoff and Tannen1982; McIntosh, Reference McIntosh2020; Ng & Bradac, Reference Ng and Bradac1993; Rudolf von Rohr, Reference Rudolf von Rohr2018; Seargeant, Reference Seargeant2020), this also includes insights from (social) psychology (e.g., Bakir, Reference Bakir2020; Cialdini, Reference Cialdini2006), media studies (Bruns et al., Reference Bruns, Enli, Skogerbo, Larsson and Christensen2015; Cheung, Reference Cheung2008; Luginbühl, Reference Luginbühl, Lenk and Vesalainen2012), sociology (e.g., Bakir et al., Reference Bakir, Herring and Miller2019; Simons & Jones, Reference Simons and Jones2011), and political science (e.g., Cobb & Kuklinski, Reference Cobb and Kuklinski1997; DiMaggio, Reference DiMaggio2017; Settle, Reference Settle2018). We also introduce the notions of misinformation (e.g., Dance, Reference Dance2019; O’Connor & Weatherall, Reference O’Connor and Weatherall2019) and echo chambers and filter bubbles (e.g., Bruns, Reference Bruns2019; Jamieson & Cappella, Reference Jamieson and Cappella2010) and how they relate to the following contributions in the edited volume. The introduction thus sets the stage for the volume chapters and establishes the interdisciplinary mindset of the volume.

3 Approaches to Persuasion

There are multiple ways to phrase the same proposition. The ability of language users to select among such options – “the tension between […] language as a set of rules vs. language as free choice” (Baker, Reference Baker2023, p. 53) – has been described as expressing ideological position through the choice of words (Stubbs, Reference Stubbs1996, p. 107). Some linguistic devices have been highlighted in the research on persuasive communication (for example, in politics and advertising) particularly frequently, and therefore appear to be useful in achieving persuasive effects. Among possible grammatical choices, Partington (Reference Partington2002, p. 7) underscores transitivity as a tool that enables the speaker “to portray reality in a way they might wish, to construct an argument in syntax.” By looking at the concordances and relative frequencies of personal pronouns in the text of the Declaration of Independence, Partington (Reference Partington2002, pp. 8–9) illustrates how the authors construct the worldview of a despotic king, always the protagonist, mistreating a blameless population that had already naturally divided into the Americans (us) and the British (them). Lexical choices also matter: for instance, studies of social media have demonstrated that tweets containing strong emotive words are significantly more likely to receive reposts and likes (Brady et al., Reference Brady, Wills, Jost, Tucker and van Bavel2017, Reference Bakir, Herring and Miller2019; Keib et al., Reference Keib, Espina, Lee, Wojdynski, Choi and Bang2018); Donald Trump’s persuasiveness has been traced to his use of high sentiment words (Liu & Lei, Reference Liu and Lei2018; Yaqub et al., Reference Yaqub, Chun, Atluri and Vaidya2017). Humă (this volume) shows that even such a minute choice as when vs. if in formulating service requests has a demonstrable effect on mobilizing productive responses. Other microlinguistic devices used to a persuasive effect include, for example, expressions of modality, especially epistemic modality, since to project a persuasive persona, the speaker must appear certain of their message (Partington & Taylor, Reference Partington and Taylor2018, p. 34). While speaker credibility is related to Aristotle’s ‘ethos,’ ‘pathos,’ or emotional appeals have been associated with the use of informal, oral-like, direct language: short, high-frequency words, short sentences, simple sentence structure (Ali, Reference Ali2019; Kreis, Reference Kreis2017; Quam & Ryshina-Pankova, Reference Quam and Ryshina-Pankova2016), vivid concrete nouns, numbers, personal pronouns, sentiment words, orality punctuation, vocatives, deictics, and questions (Blom & Hansen, Reference Blom and Hansen2014; Kuiken et al., Reference Kuiken, Schuth, Spitters and Marx2017).

Stepping up from the lexical level of language, a set of devices having to do with implicitness has been extensively described in pragmatics research. The centrality of implicitness, which can be realized in communication through conversational implicature, presupposition, or common ground, rests on the proposition that when content is conveyed implicitly, addressees are less likely to find it questionable (see Lombardi Vallauri et al., Reference Lombardi Vallauri, Cominetti and Masia2022, p. 1, and extensive references supporting this claim cited there). As studies show, implicitness is effective in persuasion (Lombardi Vallauri, Reference Lombardi Vallauri2021; Macagno, Reference Macagno2022; Sbisà, Reference Sbisà2021), although difficult to quantify and study in a replicable manner (Garassino et al., Reference Garassino, Brocca and Masia2022).

Most types of implicitness are not codified in language in a consistent and unambiguous way, and therefore require an interpretative analysis process to tease them out. The same challenge is associated with other linguistic means of persuasion such as metaphors and analogies. Even in cases where a certain linguistic form can be consistently tied to a particular function, for example, contrasts and comparisons (see Partington & Taylor, Reference Partington and Taylor2018, pp. 85–87 for a list of syntactic expressions of contrast), manual annotation is necessary to identify the relevant usages and their persuasive functions. A well-developed toolbox of linguistic qualitative analysis involving codebook development, manual annotation processes, and establishing annotation reliability can be found in the body of work in discourse analysis.

The observation that linguistic choices on the different levels of the language system contribute to constructing a certain discursive identity which, in turn, has an effect on whether the persuasion is successfully achieved, has been examined in a number of discourse analytic studies. One of the most productive strands is the study of health discourses (Al Zidjaly, Reference Al Zidjaly2017; Jager & Stommel, Reference Jager and Stommel2017; Jones, Reference Jones2013; Locher, Reference Locher2006; Rudolf von Rohr et al., Reference Rudolf von Rohr, Thurnherr, Locher, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich2019; Sillence, Reference Sillence2010, Reference Sillence2017; Thurnherr, Reference Thurnherr2017; Thurnherr et al., Reference Thurnherr, Rudolf von Rohr and Locher2016). Healthcare providers strive to give out persuasive advice that will be believed and followed by their listeners, and that persuasiveness is contingent on projecting an identity of an expert. Such a projection can be achieved through discursive strategies (reliably identifiable discourse stretches combining formal and functional patterns) that present the information in the expert’s message as ‘authentic’ and ‘trustworthy’ (Sillence, Reference Sillence2017) or ‘warranted’ (Richardson, Reference Richardson2003), and the experts themselves as ‘authoritative’ (Al Zidjaly, Reference Al Zidjaly2017), ‘authoritative but approachable’ (Locher, Reference Locher2006), ‘credible’ and ‘reasonable’ (Hyland, Reference Hyland2005). The difficulty in working out a finite, descriptively adequate set of such discursive strategies, however, lies in the negotiable and context-dependent nature of interpersonal communication. The third wave of sociolinguistics, where such studies can be most usefully grouped, entails understanding persuasion as an interpersonal process that relies on relational elements to change the addressee’s behavior (Dayter & Messerli, Reference Dayter and Messerli2022, p. 168). Following the interpersonal pragmatics framework (Locher & Watts, p. Reference Locher, Watts, Bousfield and Locher2008), a useful approach to the study of the linguistic realization of persuasion, one has to argue that no specific linguistic form is inherently persuasive in itself but gains such a function in context. This explains the variability in the taxonomies of persuasive strategies even in the subfield of health discourse: among them, for instance, references to external sources, science, and research results (Gülich, Reference Gülich2003; Locher, Reference Locher2006; Richardson, Reference Richardson2003) presented variously as a credibility building strategy or a strategy for an expert voice creation; generally it has been shown that the use of specialized terminology and jargon can contribute to an expert voice (Dayter & Rüdiger, Reference Dayter and Rüdiger2022; Diemer & Brunner, Reference Diemer, Brunner, Rüdiger and Mühleisen2020) or, alternatively, alienate the advisee (Locher, Reference Locher2006).

Despite these challenges, discourse analysis research offers the significant benefit of interdisciplinarity, allowing researchers to draw on persuasion-related findings in psychology, social sciences, and philosophy and to incorporate these findings into their analysis when examining the functional facet of the strategies. For instance, Partington and Taylor (Reference Partington and Taylor2018) in their work on persuasion in political language devote a chapter to linguistic realizations of fallacies from argumentation theory such as ad hominem arguments and tu quoque argumentative technique. Notable work from social psychology includes Cialdini’s (Reference Cialdini2006) six principles of persuasion (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, commitment and consistency, liking, and consensus) and Guadagno’s (Reference Guadagno2003) application of these principles to online communication. These principles have been adopted in interactional research on persuasion (e.g., Fischer & Ham, Reference Fischer and Ham2021; Langedijk & Fischer, this volume) and in computational linguistics (Xiao, Reference Xiao2018).

The beginning of this section has been concerned with the existing research on how persuasion is performed. Another question that would help us understand the research landscape is to what end is the speaker/writer employing persuasion? A “change in someone’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior through the transmission of a message” (Schmidt & Kess, Reference Schmidt and Kess1986, p. 2) may also represent an act of deception or manipulation if the resulting change is not in the hearer’s interest. Questions about such nefarious persuasive goals are asked in forensic linguistics, in studies of advertising discourse, for example, aggressive sales, and in research on digital surveillance (Jones, Reference Jones2020a, Reference Jones, De Fina and Georgakopoulou2020b). In political science and sociology, the study of propaganda represents a further example of manipulative discourse specifically concerned with strategically presenting political information so as to further a certain point of view, for example, through news management or spin (Jowett & O’Donnell, Reference Jowett and O’Donnell2006, p. 3).

One of the primary applications of persuasive discourse in forensic contexts concerns police interviews, and the problematic aspects of exercising linguistic power in persuading vulnerable witnesses to share information or incriminate oneself (Eades, Reference Eades2010; Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1995; Luchjenbroers & Aldridge, Reference Luchjenbroers and Aldridge2008, Introduction and the articles in the special issue). Its extension is the framing and (mis)representation of the interviewee’s words in the written statements (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard, Sarangi and Coulthard2000; Svartvik, Reference Svartvik1968).

Advertising discourse also frequently pursues aims other than satisfying the consumer’s genuine need, and can therefore be categorized as manipulative. This is reflected in the dichotomy between factual and emotional persuasive appeals described by the creative marketer David Bernstein. Bernstein (Reference Bernstein1974) introduced the terminology of reason vs. tickle copywriting strategies. Reason advertisements suggest a motive or reason for purchase; tickle advertisements appeal to humor, emotion, and mood. The distinction has been taken up in linguistic pragmatics research and linked to implicitness and off-record formulations (tickle) vs. bald-on-record direct (reason) (Simpson, Reference Simpson2001). Similarly manipulative are advertising genres such as clickbait, which strives to get the viewer to click on a link they would not have otherwise engaged with (Kuiken et al., Reference Kuiken, Schuth, Spitters and Marx2017; Blom et al., Reference Blom and Hansen2014). A subtype of manipulative persuasion are the so-called speed seduction techniques propagated by the manosphere communities, for example, the pick-up artists, which pursue the benefit of only one party and cast the other party (typically the woman) in the role of an agentless object (Dayter & Rüdiger, Reference Dayter and Rüdiger2016, Reference Dayter and Rüdiger2022). Incidentally, such techniques draw on the strategies proposed in advertising and aggressive sales, for example the Foot-in-the-Door strategy (Burger, Reference Burger1999; Guéguen et al., Reference Guéguen, Marchand, Pascual and Lourel2008).

The description of the persuasion research landscape would be incomplete without the mention of mis- and disinformation. Misinformation refers to unintentional dissemination of false information, while disinformation refers to people being deceived and manipulated purposefully. The ubiquity of social media that has substituted traditional news sources for many people has offered unprecedented possibilities for the spread of both mis- and disinformation in the form of ‘fake news.’ Abundant research on the topic has engaged with conspiracy theories (Demata et al., Reference Demata, Zorzi, Zottola, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022; Jones, Reference Jones, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022; Sergeant, Reference Seargeant, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022), (anti)vaccine misinformation (Coltman-Patel et al., Reference Coltman-Patel, Dance, Demjén, Gatherer, Hardaker and Semino2022) and COVID-19 conspiracies specifically (Ceron et al., Reference Ceron, de-Lima-Santos and Quiles2021; Lee, Reference Lee, Cheon, Lim and Fischer2022), election tampering (Musolff, Reference Musolff, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022), as well as the overall impact of fake news on media credibility and democratic institutions (Ainsworth, Reference Ainsworth, Bhatia and Tessuto2020; Tandoc et al., Reference Tandoc, Duffy, Jones-Jang and Pin2021). The persuasive power of dis- and misinformation often sits in the appealingly simplistic explanations of complex phenomena, which absolve an individual of personal responsibility and difficult decision-making. This effect is compounded by the impact of echo chambers and filter bubbles – communicative network structures brought into existence by recommender systems “whereby users are mainly directed towards content that aligns with their own declared preferences and beliefs” (Demata et al., Reference Demata, Zorzi, Zottola, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022, p. 7).

By virtue of reducing interaction between opposing groups, echo chambers facilitate persuasive discourses that aim to reinforce the shared point of view rather than to change someone’s attitudes and beliefs. Although early work excluded such practices from the definition of persuasion (cf. Schmidt & Kess, Reference Schmidt and Kess1986 cited above), contemporary discourse analysis also subsumes

Although echo chambers and filter bubbles have primarily pejorative connotations associated with irrational and socially harmful beliefs, reinforcing persuasion need not be malicious. Rudolf von Rohr (Reference Rudolf von Rohr2018), for example, describes a supportive online community where people attempting to quit smoking use persuasive discourse to strengthen one another’s resolve. The crucial observation is that manipulation, seduction, and propaganda employ a linguistic strategic repertoire similar to benevolent smoking support, trustworthy political discourse, transparent advertising, and so on. This repertoire will be illustrated in the broad range of persuasion applications in the 13 chapters of this volume, as outlined in the next section.

4 Overview of the Volume

The chapter following our introduction, written by Sandrine Sorlin, constitutes part of the opening material to the volume and provides further food for thought on the theoretical conception of persuasive discourse from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Drawing on a case study from fictional discourse, namely House of Cards, Sorlin illustrates the relationship of the trifecta of phenomena lying at the heart of this volume – persuasion, manipulation, and seduction, and relates them to the studies included in the volume.

After establishing the framework for persuasive discourse in the introductory section, the volume proceeds to studies of Persuasion and (New) Contexts of Use. The chapters within this section center their attention on linguistic persuasion across a range of contexts, including telesales (Humă), political discourse (Hoffmann), and online registers (Xiao, Lappas, & Asante-Agyei), including hotel reviews (Decock & Plevoets). Fuchs in his multi-register approach in addition draws on a large range of both spoken and written texts. These chapters collectively underscore the considerable terrain that remains uncharted in the exploration of linguistic persuasion across various domains.

More specifically, Bogdana Humă analyzes British telesales discourse and the influence of if- and when-formulated sales requests on the ensuing interactive sequence. Firmly grounded in the tradition of conversation analytical methodology, her study shows that the use of these constructions does indeed have an influence on the productivity and outcome of the sales encounter. In the next chapter, Christian R. Hoffmann focuses on the strategic use of evaluative devices in political discourse, a well-researched context in the field of language and persuasion (see above); here, however, we move to the realm of political discourse on social media, specifically, Twitter. In his corpus-linguistic study, Hoffmann uncovers differences in the use of negative evaluations in tweets by Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden during the US presidential elections in 2020 and interprets these in light of the results from previous Twitter election campaigns by Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. In Chapter 5, Lu Xiao, Theodoros Lappas, and Charis Owuraku Asante-Agyei turn their attention to the wider web by discussing the linguistic features of comments on various digital platforms (Wikipedia, Reddit, Yelp), which can be connected to persuasion. Drawing on the distinction between comments posted in discussion and non-discussion contexts and using the LWIC tool,Footnote ¹ they show that different linguistic characteristics come into play when it comes to persuasion online. Sofie Decock and Koen Plevoets are also concerned with online comments, more specifically, the use of paralinguistic features (such as emoticons, punctuation, and capitalization) in Dutch-language online hotel reviews and responses. As it turns out, the use of paralinguistic markers in the initial review posts does indeed have an influence on the creation of rapport and the ensuing comment responses by the company. Finally, Robert Fuchs bridges the study of persuasion with the World Englishes research, drawing on 1) the International Corpus of English (ICE) – a collection of numerous corpora from different regional contexts where English is used as first and second language, representing language use across registers, and 2) Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis (also known as MDA; see Biber, Reference Biber1988). Fuchs demonstrates that regional preferences and distinctions in the use of linguistic features related to the ‘involvement’ dimension likely reflect cross-cultural variations.

Persuasion operates in various situations, from everyday ones like parents convincing their children to eat broccoli to more significant cases like fundraising for social causes. However, it can also be found in less ethical contexts. These are at the heart of the next section, entitled The Dark Side of Persuasion, and readers might want to keep in mind that the contexts discussed here are of a sensitive nature (including rape and misogyny). Here, we find chapters on pick-up artists (Wright), incels (Heritage), and toxic masculinity (Lawson). Altogether, these chapters show how important it is for society to understand the mechanism and workings of persuasive discourses, particularly in the digital realm.

David Wright opens this section with a discussion of the speech act of ‘incitement’ drawing on perspectives of forensic linguistics and systemic functional linguistics. More specifically, he investigates whether comments on a pick-up artists’ forum, despite ostensibly being written to perform advice-giving or opinion-stating, can also be considered as litigable acts of incitement to rape and/or execute violence against women when taking the context into consideration. Diving even deeper into the ‘manosphere’ (cf. Marwick & Caplan, Reference Marwick and Caplan2018), Frazer Heritage presents a corpus-based discourse study on the interaction between established and new members on an incel (‘involuntary celibates’) subreddit to shed light onto processes of recruitment and attraction to a clearly harmful and noxious community. The incel community seems to differ from other groups and settings which rely on the recruitment of new members as self-evaluation presents mixed attitudes towards the in-group (while the out-group is seen as negative throughout). In the next chapter, Robert Lawson also considers radicalization processes on Reddit, albeit in the realm of politics. In his study, Lawson shows how gendered discourses as performed in a Donald J. Trump supporter subreddit play an important role in rallying others around the promotion and normalization of toxic masculinity as well as political radicalization to the far right.

Lastly, in the final thematic section of the volume (Persuasion and Algorithms), the focus shifts to algorithms and their connection to persuasion within human-machine interactions. Dance’s chapter on algorithmic disinformation aligns with the previous section, exploring the darker aspects of persuasion. On a different note, the contributions by Niebuhr and Barbosa, as well as Langedijk and Fischer, delve into questions regarding individual persuasive factors, including breathing patterns, and the potential influence that robots may exert in caregiver settings.

In his chapter, William Dance first outlines the important distinction between mis- and disinformation and depicts the three essential pillars of algorithmic disinformation: amplification, reception, and correction (also known as ARC). To illustrate how people talk about false content online, he reports the results of a corpus-based study of tweets. His research shows that while people are indeed concerned with the veracity of statements they encounter in the media in general and on social media in particular, the influence of algorithms on the spread of disinformation is heavily underrepresented in public discussions of ‘fake news,’ pointing to a crucial lack in public awareness which might need to be remedied. In the next chapter, Oliver Niebuhr and Plinio Almeida Barbosa set out to test the veracity of the commonly believed assumption that breathing patterns (abdominal breathing to be specific) are essential for the persuasiveness of speakers. To do so, Niebuhr and Barbosa conducted perception experiments and ultimately came to the conclusion that this might indeed be a myth in the speaker training community, as in their data perceived speaker charisma rested on several factors, including chest (but not abdominal) breathing. In the final thematic chapter of the volume, Rosalyn M. Langedijk and Kerstin Fischer provide insights on language and persuasion from the field of human-machine interaction. In their study, a robot used two different linguistic strategies to increase the water consumption of care workers in an experimental setup: 1) appeals to the participants’ expertise and 2) references to the expertise of others (as manifested in research). Even though both strategies did in fact increase water consumption, the appeals to the participants’ expertise were more effective. As all three chapters in this section show, the study of language and persuasion has important, very practical implications for various applications in different fields.

The discussion chapter by Rodney H. Jones brings the contributions of the edited volume together and examines the usefulness of linguistic and discursive approaches to persuasion as highlighted in the volume. Jones proposes to supplement this with an ecological approach to manipulation, influence, and deception which rests on the notion of inter(con)textuality, iterability, and metadiscursivity. Going one step further, he links the crucial implications of the scientific engagement with the language of persuasion in the online/offline nexus for the teaching of critical literacy skills.

5 Implications

The contributions in this volume draw on a number of traditions in the study of communication and language: conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, classic pragmatics, phonology, and computational linguistics. They add up to a comprehensive picture of how persuasion is performed and yield new insights to our general understanding of interpersonal (one-to-one) as well as broadcast (one-to-many) communication. Along with the established research directions, the chapters address some emergent concerns that will continue to grow in societal relevance in the near future, for example, the impact of algorithmic recommender systems on the information we consume online, or the intricacies of pseudo-interpersonal interaction between humans and robotic helpers. It is our hope that this volume will serve as a springboard for critical research questioning the nature of persuasion in the present age and providing insights for the responsible application of language technologies.