Examine persuasion strategies in Chinese on social media

Examine persuasion strategies in Chinese on social media Yu-Yun Chang Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Chengchi University yuyun@nccu.edu.tw Po-Ya Angela Wang, Han-Tang Hung, Ka-Sîng Khóo, and Shu-Kai Hsieh Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Taiwan University {d08142001, r07142007, r07142006, shukaihsieh}@ntu.edu.tw Abstract Studies based on linguistic theories have reported that internet celebrities em- ploy various persuasion strategies in their speeches. Since persuasion is closely re- lated to pragmatics which involves peo- ple’s cultural background or world knowl- edge and makes it harder for researchers to capture a specific pattern, various fea- tures are proposed by different researchers from a speaker’s perspective. In this paper, we tackle whether these theory- based features can be implemented quanti- tatively with statistic measurements from both speakers’ and readers’ perspectives in large datasets. We have examined these features based on cohesion and coherence which can help investigate the language use of the internet celebrities syntactically, semantically and even pragmatically. The results present that the extracted features in this study have an effect in identify- ing the high-influence speakers, and can be further implemented to predict influencers on social media automatically. 1 Introduction With the growth of the internet, more and more people become internet celebrities or opinion leaders of their social networks. It is found that these people have high influence on the public’s ways of thinking or behaviors by delivering a powerful speech with different persuasion strate- gies, which express their own confidence to the points they made (Dillard and Marshall, 2003) and attempt to change the opinions or behaviors of the audience (Halmari and Virtanen, 2005). Although the manipulation of persuasion strategies by a speaker will have impacts on readers, it is not guaranteed that readers will behave as expected. Readers may perceive dif- ferent susceptibilities based on their age, gender, culture, personality, and other cognitive factors (Orji et al., 2015; Ciocarlan et al., 2019; Oy- ibo et al., 2017). That is, each reader may present different degrees of effectiveness even to the same persuasion strategy. This kind of inconsistency further indicates that speak- ers’ and readers’ commitments to the proposed persuasion strategy may differ from each other. While making a discourse commitment, speak- ers would expect that readers follow and ac- cept the expressed proposition or belief (Gun- logson, 2008; Hamblin, 1970; Stalnaker, 1978). On the other hand, after receiving the message delivered by the speaker, readers would decide whether their actions will behave as expected by the speaker (Katriel and Dascal, 1989). Thus, the process of being persuaded is regarded as a reciprocal behavior (Cialdini, 1987). Various linguistic features for delivering per- suasion strategies have been proposed. How- ever, most of them focus on investigating from speakers’ point of view instead of readers’. To assess whether the performed persuasion strate- gies have successfully evoked the expected be- haviors from readers, the analysis need not to only consider the perspectives from speakers, but also from readers. Readers’ responses can be treated as a tool to assess the stance made by the speaker (Cornillie, 2018). …

Content truncated to 500 words