Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse

Suomela-Salmi, Eija; Dervin, Fred

doi:10.1075/pbns.193

Cited by 19 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Fewer cross-cultural studies, however, have been conducted on the textual characteristics of diverse cultures as they are presented in national discourses. The advertising (Terlutter et al, 2010;Yoon & Kim, 2021) and academic (Suomela-Salmi & Dervin, 2009) discourses have received a certain amount of attention in terms of the cross-cultural difference on explicitness of expression, but many other types of discourse are still left understudied. This study selects the international diplomatic discourse as the subject to investigate the national-level cross-cultural differences in explicitness of expression with quantitative register analytical methods derived from linguistics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture and Explicitness of Persuasion: Linguistic Evidence From a 51-Year Corpus-Based Cross-Cultural Comparison of the United Nations General Debate Speeches Across 55 Countries (1970-2020)

Shen

2022

Cross-Cultural Research

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The explicitness of expression or persuasion has been a critical subject of study in cross-cultural studies. The majority of cross-cultural comparisons in this respect, however, have been based on questionnaires and surveys. This study seeks to diversify the methods and validate the results with a corpus-based register analytical approach. Based on the United Nations General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) that comprises comparable multi-cultural speeches, a diachronic comparison (1970-2020) is made between the 2518 speeches (altogether 7,090,221 tokens) of 55 cultures from the East (East, South, and Southeast Asia) and the West (European Union, North America, and Australia) on the dimension ‘explicitness of persuasion’, a synthesized variable operationalized with 6 linguistic features, with the register analytical framework of Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA). The potential impacts of the political contexts on the cross-cultural gap in persuasion explicitness are tentatively discussed with the case studies on China and the United States. The results reveal significant difference between the exemplars from the East and the West on the overtness of persuasion, and the gap is generally narrowing down over the 51 years. The quantitative results provide political-setting linguistic evidence for the relevant findings of Hall, Hofstede, and Inglehart & Welzel, and the narrowing gap between cultures from the East and the West in the explicitness of expression points to an open and dynamic view of cultures. This study may offer implications for further research on the cultural styles of political persuasion.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture and Explicitness of Persuasion: Linguistic Evidence From a 51-Year Corpus-Based Cross-Cultural Comparison of the United Nations General Debate Speeches Across 55 Countries (1970-2020)

Shen

2022

Cross-Cultural Research

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Viral political communication and readability: an analysis of an Italian political blog

Bigi

2013

Journal of Public Affairs

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The Internet is widely used by political parties to report events and to send messages to the voting population. Politicians used digital media (websites, blogs, bulletin boards/lists, and chat/instant messaging) in recent elections, together with traditional media (television, newspapers, rallies, etc.). Political blogs represent not only an additional communication channel but also an instrument for spreading editorial content and messages, virally infecting more traditional media channels. A key task for any political party or politician is to make the blog understandable and easy to read as a first step to ignite and spread the right viral effect. To reach this goal, writers must consider both their content and their target audience. This article measures the readability of the text of a political blog to provide insight on the effectiveness of viral communication using blogs. The Beppegrillo.it blog was analyzed from January 2005 to May 2012 and is a unique example of a political blog using a single official media. This blog switched in the period of the study from being a personal blog to a political blog. The posts were divided into two different phases: the former were intended to discuss political topics and were written by a not-yet-political contributor; the latter were posts written by an active politician. Content analysis using simple word and sentence counts for every year of posts was undertaken, along with a readability analysis using the Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar function, and both the Gunning Fog Index and the Gulpease Index. The two different phases were compared to determine if any change occurred in readability, complexity of the text, and volume of communication. In this way, we can explore the differences in the communication techniques used in the political field unofficially and then officially. Finally, our findings indicate that levels of readability of communications, particularly among broad-based audiences, may be deteriorating significantly when the blog becomes a political one and the communication becomes more institutional.

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Persuasion: Definition, Approaches, Contexts

Dontcheva-Navratilová

2020

Persuasion in Specialised Discourses

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Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

Culture and Explicitness of Persuasion: Linguistic Evidence From a 51-Year Corpus-Based Cross-Cultural Comparison of the United Nations General Debate Speeches Across 55 Countries (1970-2020)

Culture and Explicitness of Persuasion: Linguistic Evidence From a 51-Year Corpus-Based Cross-Cultural Comparison of the United Nations General Debate Speeches Across 55 Countries (1970-2020)

Viral political communication and readability: an analysis of an Italian political blog

Persuasion: Definition, Approaches, Contexts

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