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Chapter 15 - Persuasion in Early Modern English Medical Recipes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Irma Taavitsainen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Turo Hiltunen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Jeremy J. Smith
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Carla Suhr
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
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Summary

The study of persuasion in texts focuses on the means and strategies to alter the audience’s attitude and on bringing about a change in their minds. Persuasion can seldom be associated with linguistic phenomena or categories, or in other words, linguistic categories often contribute towards the persuasiveness of a text, carrying other functions at the same time. This chapter will investigate the ways in which persuasion is interlaced with the informative and instructive contents of Early Modern English medical recipes, looking beyond the customary recipe collections into other medical genres and the recipes embedded in their texts. The approach adopts metadiscourse analysis as a tool to map linguistic item inventories by which to anchor the classical concepts of persuasion to linguistic phenomena. The study suggests that persuasion in medical recipes resides in such linguistic phenomena that can be identified by metadiscourse categories. The approach provides a useful tool for triangulating one’s observations about the persuasiveness of a text. One of the trends emerging in the Early Modern English period is the increasing variety of metadiscourse classes used in recipes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Genre in English Medical Writing, 1500–1820
Sociocultural Contexts of Production and Use
, pp. 254 - 277
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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