The Pragmatics of Persuasion in Fictional Communication
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".