Evaluation of Status as a Persuasive Tool in Spanish and American Pre-electoral Debates in Times of Crises
The evaluative function of language is explored from the point of view of the expression of “status,” or how the world is presented, and its persuasive potential in pre-electoral debates in the US and Spain. The types of statements used in two comparable corpora in Spanish and English are examined using Hunston’s model (2000; 2008) for the evaluation of “status”—the degree of alignment of a proposition and the world—to discover similarities and differences between them. The results show that, in general, all politicians prefer to use statements that refer to the actual world—“world-reflecting statements” in Hunston’s classification—rather than “world-creating propositions” in an attempt to …
The Internet as a Pedagogical Tool in the Writing Process: A Research-Based Approach
This article examines how the Internet can be used to ease the process of writing by suggesting resources for the planning, writing and revising stages and how they can be used to carry out a writing task. One such resource is the Blackboard platform, which serves as a discussion tool and for teacher-to-student and student-to-student feedback. Based on sound L2 writing theories and ICTs, a pedagogical proposal for a writing task is proposed and explained that involves invention and organizing techniques; peer and teacher evaluation using the Blackboard platform; activities to practice argumentative skills, the five-paragraph essay and paragraph structure and evaluation sheets with criteria …
Positive self-evaluation versus negative other-evaluation in the political genre of pre-election debates.
The present study explores the language of evaluation in a sub-genre of political discourse, pre-electoral debates, and its potential persuasive function for gaining voters via a contraposition of positive self-evaluation and negative evaluation of the other candidate. A further aim of this research is to check whether the candidate’s ideology has a bearing on the entities that get evaluated. After a brief examination of the characteristics of the sub-genre at hand, specifically in the Spanish context, we present the results of an evaluation analysis carried out in a corpus of 19,849 words, which is the extension of the most recent pre-electoral debate held in Spain between the candidates …