Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres ─ Providing Keys to the Rhetoric of Professional Communities

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, to go further into the understanding of how they are constructed, interpreted, used and exploited in the achievement of specific goals. Such texts are here contemplated from the stance of genre theory, which starts from the premise that specialised communities have a high level of rhetorical sophistication, the keys to which are offered solely to their members. In particular, the book investigates the communicative devices that serve the need of such professions to exert power and manipulation, and to use persuasion. The perspective adopted in this work does not envisage power simply as a distant, alienated and alienating supremacy from above, but as an everyday, socialized and embodied phenomenon. To attain its goal, the volume brings forth studies on the language of several professions belonging to various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

Maria Angeles Orts (University of Murcia, Spain) teaches Professional English, especially in the areas of law, economy and business. She has published extensively on economic and legal lexicon, corruption crimes and gender violence, power and legitimation in legal texts, and the translation and interpretation of legal genres.

Ruth Breeze is senior lecturer in English at the University of Navarra, Spain. Her most recent books are Corporate Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic 2015) and the co-edited volumes Essential Competencies for English-Medium University Teaching (Springer 2016) and Evaluation in Media Discourse: European Perspectives (Peter Lang 2017).

Maurizio Gotti is Professor of English, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and Director of the Centre for LSP Research (CERLIS) at the University of Bergamo, Italy. His main areas of investigation are the features and origins of specialized discourse.