Objectives of the workshop ‘Language and Influence’

This workshop explores how language works and how it can best be put to work in order to attain one’s goals. Influence largely depends on language: what to say, when, how and to what effect. In this age of soft power, where the aim of governments and businesses alike is to ‘engage, inform and influence’ stakeholders, a thorough training in language as a form of action and a source of influence is a prerequisite to success. 

The primary objective is to provide participants with a linguistic toolkit which will enable them to use - and defuse - the most frequent tripwires of language, such as ambiguity, analogy, argumentation and suggestion. Although the course is run in English, the lessons learned are applicable to all languages.

Another objective is to practise presentation skills. Participants will be introduced to the art of rhetoric and will be encouraged to hone the art of ‘brief, trenchant and, if possible, witty’ interventions. A study of visual language may be included in the workshop on request. Here too a toolkit of rhetorical devices is provided and applied to both photojournalism and branding. 

Approach

The workshop is exercise driven and requires active participation. Each topic is introduced by way of an interactive exercise which involves debate, impromptu oral presentation or image, text and utterance analysis. Participant contributions are appraised (but not graded) as part of a general discussion of the linguistic and rhetorical issues raised by the exercises.
Examples are provided of presidential speeches, treaties, media material and other material directly relevant to the participants’ professional interests in order to link theoretical discussion to practical examples.

Content

The following topics are on offer. Ideally, an hour should be devoted to each topic.  

1. The language of disagreement (exercise: I couldn’t disagree more)

2. The language of politeness (modals, hedges and distance) 

3. The language of credibility (‘ethos’, conviction and body language)

4. The language of emotion (‘pathos’, metaphors and gut values)

5. The language of reason (‘logos, analogies and logical fallacies)

6. The music of persuasion (tricolons, auxensis, the cadence of counterbalance)

7. The power of definition (semantic categories, polysemy and Humpty Dumpty) 

8. The manipulation of inference (frames, presuppositions and parataxis)

9. The power of suggestion (connotations and implications)

10. The power of ambiguity (constructive ambiguity and good faith interpretation)

11. The power of humour (divisive and inclusive dynamics) 

12. Ingroups and outgroups (exercise: us versus them)

The following exercises are offered as samples:

Exercise 1: ‘I couldn’t disagree more’
The participants are asked to write down an idiom and place it in a hat. As each participant pulls out an idiom and reads it aloud, its author stands up and spends up to 1 minute explaining and defending it. The other participant has up to 1 minute to disagree vehemently with the idiom. Participants are invited to include the expressions: 

• I couldn’t disagree more

• That is an absurd proposition

• Nothing could be further from the truth

• On what evidence do you say that?

The exercise is repeated round the room until each participant has had a go at defending and attacking.

Purpose: 

• To get to know each other by means of a warm-up exercise

• To adopt strong positions Pro and Contra beliefs which nobody takes to heart 

• To dramatise the language of opposition

• To practise timed speeches

Discussion:

• Overview of argumentation: evidence, emotion, logic and fallacies

• Hostility across groups (professional, cultural, ideological etc)

Exercise 2: Politeness
Participants are given lists of expressions of varying degrees of politeness and asked to order them, justifying their decision during discussion. 
Pairs are asked to simulate exchanges in which they have to:

• Use moods, modals and tenses to indicate politeness

• Use hedges and qualifications

• Use honorifics and formulae

• Avoid saying ‘no’

Purpose:

• Introduce universal and cross-cultural conventions of linguistic politeness

Discussion:

• Inflation, changing connotations and language change

• Body language

Exercise 3: Credibility
Participants are shown photos and footage of speakers and asked to evaluate how credible they find them. 
Pairs are asked to:

• Parody accent, dress code, body language

• Parody lack of authority, knowledge and conviction 

• Parody passion untempered by reason

• Simulate an interview with a conman

Purpose:

• To analyse the criteria which determine credibility

Discussion:

• Aristotle’s ‘ethos’ (credibility, authority, knowledge, conviction and honesty)

• The notion of ‘truth’

• Body language, ‘tells’ and subliminal clues

Exercise 4: Emotion
Participants are asked to analyse the following metaphors:

• War on poverty / truancy / drugs / prostitution / terror

Participants are then asked to make 2 minute emotional appeals on a topic of their choice:

• Serious: Climate security, health and safety, education, faith etc…

• Humorous: the need for pink-tinted lenses, lengthy siestas etc…

• Metaphor based: Metaphors can kill, A diplomat these days is nothing but a head-waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally, Diplomacy without force is like music without instruments, ‘One campaigns in poetry, but governs in prose.’ (Cuomo)

Purpose:

• To introduce the importance of emotions and basic values 

• To introduce metaphors and illustrate their power of persuasion

Discussion:

• The partisan mind as an emotional mind 

• Difference between metaphors and other tropes

Exercise 5: Reason
Participants are asked to analyse some video clips and transcripts of Hard Talk interviews. Each participant is assigned a devil’s advocate (a Jeremy Paxman style interviewer) whose task it is to question and pull apart the content of a presentation, scoring points by means of logical fallacies.

Purpose:

• To introduce the principles of argumentation

• To introduce logical fallacies (ad hominem, slippery slopes, reductio ad absurdum, post hoc ergo propter hoc, red herrings, exclusive choices, invalid analogies, hasty generalisations, bandwagon arguments etc…)

Discussion:

• Humour as a means of defusing tension

Exercise 6: The music of persuasion
Text analysis of refrains, tricolons, auxensis, chiasma, alliteration and other sonorous devices that make language ‘ring true’ (extracted from 100 Speeches that Changed the World and Obama’s speeches). Each pair to produce some of these tropes

Purpose:

• To alert participants to the power of oratory

• To introduce the ‘cadence of counterbalance’

Discussion:

• Orators, poets and spinmasters: common denominators

Exercise 7: Definitions and Semantic Categories
Each participant is to jot down the prototypical meanings of the following terms and then to defend them in a round table discussion in the light of conflicting definitions/practices and satirical cartoons:

• Diplomacy (gunboat and coercive diplomacy)

• Refugee (politically persecuted but not dispossessed and vice versa)

• Sovereignty (supra-sovereign authority, divided sovereignty, negative sovereignty, quasi-states)

• A ‘friendly’ service (close and reliable or casual and unprofessional?)

Purpose:

• To introduce semantic categories: how we assign membership

• To introduce linguistic hedges (in that, in so far as, technically speaking, par excellence, so to speak)

• To evaluate the pros and cons of the two approaches to semantic categorisation: Aristotelean and Prototype

Discussion

• Procrusteus, prototypes and stereotypes

• Legal, technical and computer language vs. human language

• Who determines category membership?

Exercise 8 : Suggestion 
A series of short Q&As on:

• non-equivalence in translation (examples provided and solicited)

• sense-reference definitions of ‘outreach’, ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘soft power’

• connotations of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’

• denotation of ‘WMD’, ‘WMD programmes’, ‘WMD programme related activities’

• political correctness of ‘Gypsy’ vs. Roma’; ‘Nigger’ vs. ‘Black’ vs. ‘Coloured’ etc

Purpose:

• To introduce the connotation/denotation distinction in semantics

• To analyse implications and ‘between the lines’ meaning

Discussion:

• Political correctness: language is not prejudiced, people are

• Linguistic determinism: the relationship between language, attitude and action 

• Who determines word meaning; to what extent is it negotiable?