Evidence-based persuasion: A cross-cultural analysis of entrepreneurial pitch in English and Spanish

Since the definition of elevator pitch, e.g. Pagliarini (2001), researchers have debated the ‘right’ way to pitch an idea. Entrepreneurial pitch is widely taught in business communication, and although most research is based on the content, e.g. Pollack, Rutherford and Nagy (2017), the rhetorical and linguistic characteristics are less researched in English, e.g. Daly and Davy (2016a, b), or indeed other languages. This paper, reports on the rhetorical relations found within obligatory and optional stages in pitch discourse from a previously analysed data set comprising two different corpora: ten English and ten Spanish sets of entrepreneurial pitch. The conclusion suggests a tendency to use five rhetorical relations: result, elaboration, preparation, background and purpose emerging within the obligatory stages in all 20 pitches. In addition, an evaluation relation is present in the pitches that are funded and thus are successful. The intercultural analysis of the two spoken corpora suggest that obligatory stages in Pitch may affect the Rhetorical Structure Theory relations used to convey speakers’ intentions in British English and Peninsular Spanish.