Contrastive Analysis Of Successful And Unsuccessful Persuasion From The Perspective Of Systemic-functional Grammar

According to Business Dictionary, persuasion is a process aimed at changing a person’s(or a group’s) attitude or behavior toward some event, idea, object, or other person(s), byusing written or spoken language to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or acombination thereof. Persuasion frequently occurs in the process of verbal communication,and its function is to influence the addressees’ behaviors or attitudes. As it plays an importantrole in activities for personal gain such as election campaign, trial advocacy, sales promotionetc., it has attracted great interest of numerous scholars. Most of the researches on persuasionhave been done from the perspective of rhetorics, psychology and sociology (Burke,1969;Richard,1986; Cialdini,2001) but researches on persuasion based on systemic-functionalgrammar are rather limited and contrastive studies between successful and unsuccessfulpersuasion are even fewer. Therefore it is necessary to do contrastive studies betweensuccessful and unsuccessful persuasion based on systemic-functional grammar and attitudesystem.Systemic-functional grammar was proposed by Halliday. According to Halliday (1994),there are three metafunctions of language: ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. Thisresearch will focus on interpersonal function. Interpersonal function includes three aspectsnamely speech role, mood and modality. Attitude system is a subsystem of Appraisal systemput forward by J. R. Martin (2005) as a development of Halliday’s systemic-functionalgrammar. It is concerned with emotional reactions, judgments of behaviors and evaluation of things (Martin&White,2008), and is categorized into affect, judgment and appreciation.This research collects8conversations containing persuasion from the American TVseries Desperate Housewives as the data, of which4are successful in persuading, while4areunsuccessful. Data analysis shows that all persuasion speech acts in the8conversations fallinto four categories: the first one is to persuade someone to stop doing something; the secondis to persuade someone to do the persuader a favor; the third is to persuade someone inadversity to change their negative approach into a positive one; the fourth is to persuadesomeone to accept the persuader’s proposals. The contrastive analysis of successful andunsuccessful persuasion of each category shows that the differences between them lie in theaspects of speech role, mood, modality and attitude.In terms of speech role, it is found that the difference between the persuaders andaddressees in times of taking on the speech role of giving in successful persuasion is muchsharper than that in unsuccessful persuasion. Data analysis shows that in successfulpersuasion, persuaders take on speech role of giving for76times, addresses33times; inunsuccessful persuasion, persuaders take on the speech role of giving for69times, addressees77times. Besides, as the conversation is going on, persuaders in successful persuasion take onthe speech role of giving for more times when approaching to the end of the conversation,while the persuaders in unsuccessful persuasion gradually lose dominance and talk less.The analysis of mood, modality and attitude demonstrates that in successful persuasion,persuaders tend to express positive attitude in polar forms or high-value modalities towardsthe addressees or some entity the addressees admire, while persuaders in unsuccessfulpersuasion tend to express negative attitude in polar forms or median-or high-valuemodalities towards the addressees or some entity the addressees admire. Moreover, thepersuaders in successful persuasion tend to express negative attitude in polar forms orhigh-value modalities towards themselves while the persuaders in unsuccessful persuasiontend to express positive attitude in polar forms or high-value modalities towards themselves.In terms of mood structure, persuaders in successful persuasion employ76declaratives,10interrogatives and10imperatives; persuaders in unsuccessful persuasion employ70declaratives,12interrogatives and10imperatives. In terms of modality, persuaders insuccessful persuasion adopt29polar forms,7high-modalities,5median-modalities and1low modality; persuaders in unsuccessful persuasion adopt24polar forms,8high-modalities and3median modalities. In terms of attitude, persuaders in successful persuasion use32positiveattitude resources and14negative attitude resources; persuaders in unsuccessful persuasionuse12positive attitude resources and26negative attitude resources.