Interaction in early modern news discourse: the case of English witchcraft pamphlets and their prefaces (1566–1621)

Abstract

This investigation examines the interactional dimension of the preface section of an early form of news discourse. Informed by the framework of metadiscourse and incorporating insights from the study of stance and evaluation, this study explicates the ways in which the witchcraft pamphleteers strategically structured and designed the texts to secure readers' agreement through conceptual interaction. Differences in the selection of metadiscourse contributed to different writer identities and reflected generic conventions that occurred over time.Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of heteroglossic mass-mediated discourse for a National Public Radio (NPR) segment. Two Chicago teenagers covered the story of five-year-old Eric Morse, who was pushed to his death from a fourteenth-story housing project window. On a micro-discursive level, each voice represented in this segment is an amalgamated blend of lived experiences with respect to this tragedy and the events surrounding it, as well as participation in speech chains of mass-communicative, historical, and segmental natures. While presented as a documentary examining a major news event in depth through "authentic" correspondents, this segment is edited and packaged to appeal to a certain demographic makeup. Macrosociological constructs of race, class, and social position are reflected in these highly localized discourses as these experiences are edited and "packaged" for a specific listening audience.

Current Issues in Medieval England

“…Aristotle's different means of persuasion are ethos, pathos and logos� Ethos is the appeal through the character of the author: it is about the credibility of the source of knowledge and how he or she appears to the audience� Pathos is persuasion by appealing to the audiences' emotions� Logos is appealing to the reason of the audience, i�e� persuasion through logical reasoning� These concepts remain in use still today, even if rhetorical analysis of modern genres has evolved to other concepts as well, e�g� in the rhetorical move analysis of research articles (Nwogu 1997, Swales 2004)� Persuasive discourse is "primarily focused on the decoder and attempts to elicit from him a specific action or emotion or conviction" (Kinneavy 1971: 21)� It aims at (re)production, reinforcement, and transmission of ideologies (Chaemsaithong 2011;Jucker 1997)� In the light of these ideas, it can be inferred that persuasion is always directed at an audience, and also that persuasion is a communicative purpose (Swales 1990), even though it is never the sole purpose of any text� This means persuasion always coexists with other agendas of any text, and that there are no texts that would not to some extent also be persuasive (Östman 2005)� Thus, there are no genre labels that would identify a genre of persuasive texts, even though the communicative goals of a text are exactly the key to identifying the persuasiveness of a text (Halmari -Virtanen 2005)� According to Östman (2005: 200), persuasion is inherently implicit, even if in some genres persuasion is manifested more explicitly than in others� This premise of implicitness of persuasion translates into two interim conclusions: 1) there are no linguistic features identified with persuasion alone, and 2) any categories of persuasive linguistic features are necessarily members of another category as well, i�e� linguistic features deemed persuasive would also carry other meanings or functions� The latter conclusion agrees with the idea of texts being seats of multiple agendas, persuasion among them� As ethos, pathos, and logos are usually deemed unmappable to precise linguistic forms, it creates a challenge for the linguistic study of persuasion� Recent work on metadiscourse (Hyland 1998(Hyland , 2005(Hyland , 2009 has identified linguistic items that authors/ speakers use to provide information on the relations of the participants in a communicative situation and the text itself (Quintana-Toledo 2009: 21)� The notion of metadiscourse has given the impulse to investigate whether Aristotelian rhetorical concepts and inventories of metadiscourse items could be reconciled in any useful way� Remapping metadiscourse items onto rhetorical concepts would provide a way to triangulate the data, and thus possibly provide new insights into the material and the concept of persuasion� Metadiscourse refers to the means in which the author comments the text, builds a relationship with the audience, and guides the reader through the text� According to Taavitsainen (2000: 193), metadiscourse items consist of "[…] comments about the evolving text rather than about the subject matter� […] These comments have two main functions: textual and interpersonal"� Therefore, the study of metadiscourse is the study of textual elements that either facilitate the reading process of a text by explaining and highlighting the text structure and by c...…”

Analysis of interactive speaking roles in a paratextual genre: The case of witchcraft pamphlets’ prefaces (1566–1621)

“…Recent linguistic studies on prefatory materials in witchcraft pamphlets have examined linguistic resources that signal writer stance and interpersonal engagement, such as frame markers, code glosses, and evidentials (Chaemsaithong, 2013). Such devices enable the pamphleteers to depict the accused individuals as threats to society, while presenting themselves positively through goodwill (Chaemsaithong, 2011).…”

“…While the above studies are insightful and do much to inform the present study, they are only preliminary, based on selected texts from each period, and they focus on specific linguistic devices, such as rhetorical strategies (Chaemsaithong, 2011) and meta-discourse (Chaemsaithong, 2013). More importantly, they assume a monolithic identity of the pamphleteers, but they do not consider how, within the broader role of the writer, the pamphleteers may have taken on and embedded different identities and speaking perspectives.…”

“…However, informed by Goffman's concept of footing (1981), this study does not reify the identity of pamphleteer (e.g. Chaemsaithong, 2011Chaemsaithong, , 2013Suhr, 2012), but instead seeks to explore in detail how pamphleteers consistently negotiate meanings by orchestrating and embedding different voices and speaking perspectives in and through a given stretch of prefatory texts, thereby exhibiting complex interactional feats.…”