How Repetition and the Structuring of Information Co-contribute to Persuasiveness: A Case Study on I Have a Dream
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Persuasion as a rhetorical phenomenon has received extensive scholarly attention from different points of view, with various persuasive strategies identified such as lexical choice, pronoun use, mood and modality, etc. However, the influence of information structure (e.g. Firbas 1995, Svoboda 1983) on persuasive effects has not received due attention in literature. The present study demonstrates the cognitive significance of how the speaker's structuring of information flow and its interplay with repetition can serve as a powerful persuasive strategy. To illustrate our point, we analyze Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speech, I Have a Dream, along the lines of the framework of Functional Sentence Perspective (Firbas 1992). |
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