La emoción en la argumentación: el uso de pena como estrategia del discurso de la persuasión.

The study of pena and its formal variants illustrates how the emotional and subjective content can take on an argumentative value and become an additional tool for persuasive discourse. With a Pragmatic Linguistics approach (Fuentes Rodríguez, 2017a[2000] and 2017b), this paper explains emotion at the sentence and the macrosyntax level, relating the study of (im)politeness with operations of face and argumentative force. Basing the analysis on examples taken from the MEsA digital corpus and from documents about politics in CREA and CORPES XXI, this study presents syntactic patterns of great persuasive value in current Spanish and illustrates that pena has not reached the degree of grammaticalization as a discursive operator of lástima. In addition, the results confirm that the meaning of pena can be exploited in various discursive strategies: with the value of apology, of interpersonal closeness, of empathy with the misfortune of others, as an operation of self-image, as an increase of the argumentative force of the discourse or as an attenuator and intensifier of impoliteness. The conclusions relate such functions to the different types of discourse studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]