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ABSTRACT
This paper aims at studying the persuasive language of horoscopes from online
versions of the following American newspapers: Los Angeles Times, New York Daily
News, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. 2544 horoscopes have been
selected during 53 days, and 943 conditional structures have been found. Latour and
Woolgar (1979) state that the objective of rhethoric persuasion is to convince the
participants that they haven’t been convinced, and Halliday (1985) points out that
persuasion tends to be highly implicit and to avoid attitudinal language, which is
usually associated with interpersonal meaning. The horoscope is a text genre, thus,
according to Martin (1984), it can be separated in stages, each of those with its
specific function. 37,06% of the analized horoscopes present some kind of
conditional structure, with the explicit connector, ‘if’ (30,75%), or implicit ones
(69,25%). Protasis occurs, mostly (71,15%), preposed to the apodosis, functioning
as sentence Themes, and, therefore, restricting the content of the Rhemes. The
language of horoscopes also presents elements of metadiscursive modality, such as
person markers, hedges and emphatics. Besides, one of the stages consists of a
kind of truth, a belief that has its roots in polular culture and that helps the reader
rescue a specific intertext that the hosroscope writer previously had in mind. In
addition, there is the theory of frames (Bednarek, 2005), responsible for text
coherence – which is attributed, in this case, by the text readers -, that focuses on
the relation among text, context, world knowledge, and coherence. Thus, by reading
a horoscope, the reader interacts with the text, giving it the most coherent meaning
according to their own world knowledge. These factors prepare the readers for the
reading and, therefore, they do not question what has been predicted by the author
and, at the same time, they act impelled by the power of this genre. The same
factors also prevent the horoscope writers from making mistakes regarding their
predictions. All that makes horoscopes a highly pesuasive text genre.This kind of
persuasion is implicit, for it makes use of a combination of specific lexico-
grammatical choices and specific contexts. Regarding the lexico-grammar, this paper
focuses on structures that convey conditional meanings, emphasizing Géis’s (1971)
concept of invited inferences and the relation between conditional structures and
Theme, and conditional meaning. It also refers to Critical Discourse Analysis
(Fairclough, 1992; Fowler, 1991), concerning the social function of language, and to
Halliday’s (1985; 1994) functional model, for the connection between language
structures and social values. People are interested in horoscopes because they
seem to work as a source for advice and entertainment as, according to Spengler
(1969), religious faith has been replaced by other beliefs. The metodology adopted is
interpretative, based on quantitative data.
Key-words: persuasion, intertext, conditional structures, systemic-functional
linguistics, horoscope, text genre, iterpersonal function.