As communication grows ever more media-centric, it often intends to modify the addressee’s attitude. In this context, our chapter aims to investigate a relatively little- examined film review genre from the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical perspective. The selected corpus consists of one hundred French and Polish journalistic reviews of three famous films from 2019. The act of persuasion we focus on corresponds to a set of strategies exploiting exploiting the deliberative and epideictic dimensions of discourse as well as the rhetorical principles of movere and delectare in order to instil particular views and concepts. Hence, to some extent, the described procedures draw on other discourses, such as elite, advertising, stylistic and filmic discourse. Therefore, our study centres around these new intrinsic features of the film review’s multifaceted nature considered as a sociocultural activity based on the justified assessment and the addresser’s ethos.

The subject of the present study is the persuasive function of irony in a special type of media discourse called socio-political editorial. The use of irony enables the journalist to establish the axiological domain of editorial in order to reinforce the information content and manipulate the readers’ opinions. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to describe the problem of language manipulation in verbal irony considered by the author as one of semantico-rhetorical means of evaluation. The analyzed articles were culled from selected web pages of French journals and magazines (2005-2008) treating about two types of social reforms and the urban violence in French suburbs.

This paper examines the discursive construction of persuasiveness in media language. Analysing the corpus consisting of forty reviews of the French comedy “Intouchables” (2011), different invariant characteristics of the genre ‘fi lm review’ are established in the light of two discursive strategies of persuasion based on metonymy and the rhetorical argument from community and authority. As the mentioned strategies assume that the discourse is to infl uence the addressees’ will, decisions and emotions, they refl ect some of the persuasive techniques used in advertising discourse, especially with regard to indirect means of interpretation, suggestion and evaluation. Therefore, different methods for (re)construction of the reality presented in the analysed texts stem from shared values and emotions becoming starting points for the deliberative dimension of the fi lm review. Since our perception of the world is relative, the deployed strategies aim at eliminating the information verifi cation process. Thus, they shape the interpretation of the message towards a set of parameters governing its attractiveness in order to meet the contemporary addresses’ needs.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the discursive strategies of persuasion exploring the rhetorical

argument from community combined with linguistic politeness. Based on eighty reviews of two French

comedies, the author shows how the persuasive strategies reflect some methods used in advertising

discourse, especially with regard to the rhetoric principle of movere and delectare and indirect means

of interpretation, activated in discourse by the use of quantity and quality.