Persuasion techniques in British and American business presentations

The present research conducted within the framework of the lingua-pragmatic approach looks into persuasion techniques used in British and American business presentations. The corpus for the analysis comprises a collection of presentations of company representatives.

Persuasion is viewed as a type of social interaction which includes attempts to influence the recipient and change their attitudes in an atmosphere of free choice. Persuasive argumentation is based on three major principles: logos, ethos and pathos. Rational argumentation can occur only in an atmosphere of emotional engagement. A persuasion technique is a complex set of linguistic tools used to convince someone of something, change their attitudes and receive response without impinging on them.

The aim of the paper is to identify core and peripheral persuasive techniques used in successful presentations, classify them in accordance with basic principles of argumentation and describe linguistic means used to realize them. Core persuasion techniques are logos-oriented, whereas peripheral techniques aim to appeal to the audience’s emotions. The authors give ample examples and present a thorough analysis of the persuasion techniques used in the analyzed corpus. The analysis allows to describe the mechanism of persuasion. The study reports findings that in presentations peripheral techniques are wide-spread with “subject-representation” being the most common pathos technique, and “self-representation” – the most common ethos one.