Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres

María Ángeles Orts (University of Murcia, Spain) teaches Professional English, especially in the areas of law, economy and business. She has published extensively on economic and legal lexicon, corruption crimes and gender violence, power and legitimation in legal texts, and the translation and interpretation of legal genres.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, to go further into the understanding of how they are constructed, interpreted, used and exploited in the achievement of specific goals. Such texts are here contemplated from the stance of genre theory, which starts from the premise that specialised communities have a high level of rhetorical sophistication, the keys to which are offered solely to their members. In particular, the book investigates the communicative devices that serve the need of such professions to exert power and manipulation, and to use persuasion. The perspective adopted in this work does not envisage power simply as a distant, alienated and alienating supremacy from above, but as an everyday, socialized and embodied phenomenon. To attain its goal, the volume brings forth studies on the language of several professions belonging to various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, bringing forth studies on the language of various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

María Ángeles Orts/Ruth Breeze: Introduction - Vijay K. Bhatia/Aditi Bhatia: Interdiscursive Manipulation in Media Reporting: The Case of the Panama Papers in India - Ana Bocanegra-Valle: Empowering the Discourse of Globalization in International Organizations: The International Maritime Organization as a Case in Point - Shirley Carter-Thomas/Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet: Maintaining a Dominant Voice: A Syntactic Analysis of the Way Power is Wielded in Medical Editorials - Giuliana Elena Garzone: Persuasive Strategies on Surrogacy Websites: A Discourse-Analytical and Rhetorical Study - Esther Monzó-Nebot: 'Silence will Break my Bones': The Presentation and Representation of Victims and Perpetrators at the Service of Just-world Views in Judicial Discourse - Pascual Pérez-Paredes: A Keyword Analysis of the 2015 UK Higher Education Green Paper and the Twitter Debate - Antoinette Mary Fage-Butler: Persuading against Gender Violence: An Interdiscursive Genre Analysis - Daniel Gallego-Hernández: Persuasion in Promotional Banking Products: A Comparative Corpus-based Study - Diana Giner: Rhetorical Strategies of Persuasion in the Reasoning of International Investment Arbitral Awards - Maurizio Gotti: Power and Persuasion in Arbitration: East vs West - Juan C. Palmer-Silveira: Showing Power and Persuasion in Business Communication: The Corporate News Section in Websites and Social Media - Carmen Sancho Guinda: Transmitting Authority in Risk Communication: An Exploration of U.S. Air-Accident Dockets Online - Holly Vass: The Role of Hedging in Balancing Power and Persuasion in the Judicial Context: The Case of Majority and Dissenting Opinions