Persuasion as a strategy of speech influence in bilingual academic discourse

The paper examines the mechanism of speech influence persuasion strategy in English-language bilingual academic communication. The research points out that the problem of speech influence in discourse practices has been given insufficient attention from the perspective of psycholinguistics. Consequently, the aim of the research is to create a model of persuasion strategy incorporating the speaker’s choice of vocabulary and grammar in natural language (in this instance, English). Using the speech activity theory and the activity paradigm in psychology as a theoretical framework, the paper employs introspection, modelling, content, contextual and semantic analysis methods. Speech events in lectures from the MICASE corpus provided the material of the research, which attempts to describe the functional potential of discourse units in the context of informing, evidential argumentation and generalisation as tactics of the persuasion strategy. The paper presents the persuasion strategy through the lens of illocutionary, locutionary and perlocutionary acts. We established that the mechanism of persuasion strategy, determined by the motives, goals and personal understanding of the speaker, defines language choices and academic identity on the basis of their cultural identity, active learning attitude and internalization of academic concepts. The authors conclude that special language units in the persuasion strategy at the vocabulary, grammar and phrase levels are instruments of speech influence that resolve communicative obstacles, increase the efficiency of academic material communication, supplement the bilingual’s individual lexicon with new conceptual representations and subject interrelations, as well as realize communicative intentions.