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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.859-872
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 24 Jul 2023 Revised 07 Oct 2023 Accepted 15 Oct 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202310.859

Persuade, Convince, and Dissuade: A Corpus Study

Juwon Lee
Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Education Jeonju University juwonlee@jj.ac.kr


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The verbs persuade and convince are often used interchangeably due to their synonymous meanings. However, there is a need to explore whether there are any syntactic or semantic differences between these two verbs. This paper aims to address this inquiry by conducting a comprehensive analysis of data from the British National Corpus (BNC). The study examines the distribution and syntactic patterns associated with persuade and convince to identify their most frequent types of constructions and their associated meanings. Additionally, the analysis includes the verb dissuade to further explore its distinctive nature. The findings reveal that persuade is predominantly used in control constructions involving the performance of a specific action, while convince is typically employed in non-control constructions involving influencing a belief or conviction. Furthermore, dissuade is identified as a negative control construction that discourages an action. The paper concludes that while persuade and convince share a similar lexical meaning, their constructional and semantic preferences differ significantly. Understanding these differences can contribute to a more precise and effective use of language in different contexts.

Keywords:

persuade, convince, dissuade, syntactic patterns, control constructions, non-control constructions, corpus

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