How Ethos and Pathos Appeals Resonate in Reader Interpretations of Social Media Messages
Rhetorical strategies and their influence on audiences are often studied through social media posts and comments. However, this focus overlooks the universal audience, which is the majority of readers who remain silent and do not explicitly express how a message affects them. This study investigates how two classical modes of persuasion, ethos and pathos, resonate in the silent audience's interpretations of meaning. Using a dataset of social media sentences paired with human-written interpretations, we label both sources for ethos and pathos and assess whether these rhetorical appeals are preserved. Our analyses show that interpretations diverge from the original sentences in 30% of cases...
| Authors | Ewelina Gajewska, Katarzyna Budzynska, Jaroslaw Chudziak et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 July 2026 |
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