Persuasion markers and ideology in eighteenth century philosophy texts (CEPhiT)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the presence of persuasion markers in the eighteenth century texts of the Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT), a sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus. 2 It is also my intention to ascertain to what an extent the genteel, social and religious ideology of the period is present in both the texts and in prefaces to these works written by the authors themselves. The paper will be organized as follows. Section One describes the function of persuasion in the author-reader relationship of eighteenth century English-speaking countries, as well as the dominant ideological postulates which underpin it. Section Two presents the methodology and the corpus material selected for the analysis, Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis (MD henceforth) and CEPhiT, respectively. Section Three sets out the analysis of data, through which I offer a quantitative approach to persuasive strategies followed by a functional interpretation, paying special attention to the text-type/genre variable and comparing overall results with those that refer specifically to female authors. Conclusions and final remarks will be discussed in Section Four.