Persuasion in English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer a description of the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT) as well as to present a pilot study on persuasion strategies. Although this corpus contains samples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only eighteenth-century texts have been selected for this study. Methodologically speaking, some specific linguistic features indicating persuasion and argumentation (Biber, 1988) have been searched for: predictive modals, necessity modals, conditional subordinators and verbs with a suasive meaning. The interpretation of our findings will provide an overview of the author-reader relationship in late Modern English Philosophy writings, especially focusing on variables such as sex or genre.

Keywords

• scientific English
• corpus linguistics
• persuasion strategies
• late Modern period
• philosophy writing
• authorial presence