The Pragmatics of Persuasion in Fictional Communication

Abstract

By drawing on a pragmatic approach manifested in five pragmatic concepts: directive speech acts, rhetorical questions, back-channel support, gap-bridging, and interruption, this paper attempts to explore the pragmatic weight of the five pragmatic concepts as conduits of persuasion and/or manipulation at the intradiegetic level of fictional communication represented by Orwell’s Animal Farm. The main objective of the paper, therefore, is to provide a linguistic analysis of the pragmatic strategies effecting persuasiveness in Orwell’s novel. One overarching research question is addressed here: to what extent are the five pragmatic concepts employed as strategies of persuasion and/or manipulation in the selected data? The paper reveals three main findings: first, the five pragmatic strategies under investigation contribute effectively to the production of three types of persuasion at the character-to-character level of discourse: pure, manipulative, and coercive persuasion. Second, the five strategies at hand are manifested in various linguistic forms, including imperatives, interrogatives, lexicalization, and slogans. Third, despite the fact that the pragmatic approach is much more pertinent to the conversational genre, it is linguistically evidenced in this paper that the same approach proves analytically relevant to the study of narrative texts, which further accentuates the crucial role of fictional discourse as a source of data in the advancement of linguistic models and analytical frameworks.