Persuasion Strategies and Posthumanism: a corpus-based study

Abstract

Taking the reality as a reference, science fiction, somehow, connects the concepts of science, or knowledge about the structure and behaviour of the natural and physical world, based on facts that can be proven, and fiction, a type of literature that describes unreal events that occur to imaginary people within a fantasy environment. Thus, one of the most interesting issues regarding science fiction lies in its use of language due to its stylistic and narrative development; also, on the communication of ideas that sooner or later engage and influence the reader. Although the most usual thing is expecting science fiction to be particularly concerned with science, this is not always the case. In fact, as with non-fiction texts, the main preoccupation is usually what is communicated, rather than how it is communicated, even though the latter also affects the effect. The aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of how in science fiction literature, as well as in non-fiction works, the explicit and implicit material of the texts provokes the persuasion of the reader (regarding the content of the texts). Likewise, I intend to study the most common linguistic strategies of persuasion used in discourse (i.e., stance, hedging, interpersonal markers, etc.), as well as to see whether differences in use can be observed attending to certain factors such as the sex of the authors and the period in which a work was composed. For this purpose, data will be drawn from a corpus of my own, consisting of the compilation of science fiction and non-fiction texts published by male and female authors between 1950 and 2017 and relating to transhumanism and posthumanism. These corpora will allow a diachronic, comparative-contrastive (both quantitative and qualitative) study of discourse from numerous linguistic, pragmatic, and stylistic points of view.