What Influences Influence? How the Communicative Situation Influences Persuasion

This special issue addresses how aspects of the communicative situation influence how influential persuasive utterances (or other strategies of influence) are in their contexts of use.Specifically, we study the effects of interactional, speaker-, addressee-and channelrelated factors and of the interpersonal relationship between speaker and hearer, as well as the effects of refering to the shared context itself.The papers combined in this special issue provide efvidence for the considerable impact of the here and now of the interactional context on the persuasiveness of strategies of influence and contribute to our understanding of mechanisms of persuasion.