Renata Povolná – författare

This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad’s (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell’s (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales’ (1990)  genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.

This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad’s (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell’s (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales’ (1990)  genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.

This book adopts various newly emerged and established approaches to text analysis, including pragmatics, discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, ethnography and artificial intelligence to explore multilayered meaning-making in text and discourse. The eight parts of the book analyse various discourses – academic, media, political, business, fiction and advertising – to study gender stereotyping, hate speech, political manipulation, direct speech in fiction, constructions in context, metadiscourse, modality, rhetorical moves and the role of artificial intelligence in academic discourse. The aim is to enrich the reader's understanding of text analysis by looking beyond the surface of the text and revealing how language constructs, reflects and models social relations, expresses values and beliefs and mediates social interaction. The book’s original contribution is the integration of traditional and emerging methods. It provides a comprehensive overview of current developments in text analysis which will appeal to experienced researchers, students and professionals.