Contrasting the Reader Positioning Strategies in the Environmental Discourse of Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace France

This paper investigates the potential differences in the strategies of persuasion employed in activist campaign emails written in English and French. Developing recent work by Don (2019) and Peter White (2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b), it seeks to highlight how the imagined reader is positioned as being at various levels of alignment and affiliation with the author. The analysis is based on a corpus comprising 50 campaign emails received from Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace France. While the two groups adopt similar attitudinal positions regarding environmental issues, they nevertheless can be distinguished in the role given to the imagined reader in the resolution of the campaign issue. More specifically, the texts can be characterized in terms of disparity of knowledge, experience, and capacity to act between writer and the reader-in-the-text (Thompson, 2012). The stance that the writer takes to the imagined reader is either “identifying” in the English emails, that is, between equals, or “authoritative” in the French emails, where the reader is limited to a supporting role. The analysis focuses on the use of markers of disclaim and concur, inclusive versus exclusive personal (pro)nominal groups, and a proposed cline of realization of commands directed toward the reader.