📕 subnode [[@luciana/rhetorical analysis]] in 📚 node [[rhetorical-analysis]]
📓 garden/luciana/rhetorical analysis.md by @luciana

Rhetorical Analysis

  • by [[Claudia Posch]] in [[The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics]]
  • Definition: ways of finding and interpreting persuasive strategies in language
  • language of politics is the result of rhetorical creativity and the object of rhetorical analysis
  • History:
    • Has been important since ancient Greece
      • For Aristotle, rhetoric was an essential part of politics (ethical discipline)
      • was practiced in political settings and to persuade citizens of political matters
      • thus rhetoric and politics have always been closely bounded
    • over time rhetoric gained a negative connotation (empty words)
    • in the twentieth century: increasingly scientific occupation, new research traditiosna dn approaches
  • Analysis theoretical perspectives (Kienpointner)
    • TRADITIONAL OR CLASSICAL
    • pre-modern concepts, esp. Aristotelian notions
      • Aristotle:
        • first systematic theory to explore the way persuasion works by analyzing its parts:
        • three means to persuade an audience: ethos (character of the speaker), pathos (emotions of the audience) and logos (arguments in speech). These categories are still used.
        • three speech genres which help making sense of communicative events in context:
          • forensic: judicial. Justness or unjustness of past actions, is a past event justifiable from a present perspective?
          • political: deliberative. Are future political actions advantageous for the estate or not?
          • epideictic (demonstrative): should a person's present action be praised or chastised?
        • framework to analyse communicative acts: tasks of a speaker and stages of speech:
          • inventio: finding arguments/invention.
            • arguments can be found in topoi.
            • 28 common arguments
          • dispositio: structuring/arranging
            • introduction, presentation of facts, argumentation and epilogue
          • elocutio: formulation and style
            • virtues of style of linguistic expression: grammatical correctness, clarity, adequacy, brevity, embellishment
          • memoria: memory
            • practice of communication, thinking of the form of presentation and remembering the ideas for presentation
          • actio: delivery
            • performance of a rhethor
      • Until 20th cent, little changed and rhetoric went out of fashion, reduced to a theory of style
      • Linguistic turn: interest in rhetoric as an important element of public discourse increased again
    • New rhetoric
      • Rhetoric today:
        • responsible for displaying public reason and justifying contingent claims in the public formula
        • constitutes a public by understanding and negotiating common bonds, interests, experiences, etc.
      • strongly influenced by [[Chaïm Perelman]] and [[Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca]]
        • they reincorporated rhetoric as a tool into academic discussion
        • their view on rhetoric:
          • theory of plausible argumentation (as opposed to strictly mathematical or logical approaches)
          • a framework to understanding how beliefs and behaviours are shaped by communicative practices and specific communicative events
        • they presented a typology of argumentative schemes
      • other theorists:
        • Stephen Toulmin:
          • Toulmin schema: essential components of argumentation
          • influenced the informal logic research programme
            • looks at argumentation in everyday language
        • Pragma-dialectics:
          • aims to create a link between formal dialectics and rhetoric
          • pragmatic: influenced by Grice's speech act theory, logic of conversation and discourse analysis
      • Both models are often integrated with other analytical frameworks (philosophy, social sciences, linguistics: critical discourse studies, discourse historical approach, politolinguistics)
      • Linguistic rhetorical analysis:
        • Meynet states that rhetorical analysis belongs to linguistics because of its object, methods and procedures.
        • politolinguistics: relies on concepts from the political science, rhetorical and discourse-analytical categories
        • Rhetorical analysis is important to analyse political discourse because rhetoric in politics is characterized by persuasiveness (as democracy relies on agreements for decision-making processes)
    • Discursive approaches to rhetorical analysis:
      • researcherss of rhetorical criticism or rhetorical theory are not very commonn
      • Discourse-centered approaches: combination of traditional modes of rhetorical criticism with tools of linguistics analysis
        • Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA): stresses the importance of history in the analysis of political discourse. Texts are never isolated. Relationship between power and language. Focus on right wing and populist rhetoric.
    • Analysing rhetorical devices
      • public discourse is primarily argumentative
      • thus rhetorical analysis focuses on argumentation analysis based on argumentation schemes and typologies, which have been recently renewed and questioned.
      • 2 main areas:
        • Logical structure analysis of argumentation
          • structures of argumentation are omnipresent in everyday language and more so in everyday political arguments
          • argumentation schemes are useful to analyze the logical structure in arguments/invention.
          • Structures:
            • most basic: major premise A then conclusion B
            • but in complex discourse structures are much less transparent: for example, Walton and Hansen's structure, argument from fairness
          • schemes are not enough to assess an argument profoundly, to do this critical questions about it must be asked
            • a strict distinction between fallacies and non-fallacies in analyzing arguments is not as useful in everyday language as it is in logic
            • different evaluation of fallacies that include linguistic and communicative aspects
            • also, is emotive language acceptable? and when
            • what we name is just as important as what we do not, so the focus cannot be only on the structure of arguments
        • Semantics of arguments. topics
          • extra logical vocabulary must be considered in argumentation analysis
          • argumentative topoi: the actual meaning of the words in the context of argumentation
            • topoi: conclusion rules that connect the argument/s with the conclusion or claim. always connected to the context of an argumentation and they proliferate if the range of rhetorical situations is wider. example: the topos of danger and threat (if something is is dangerous, one should do something against it
      • Fallacious arguments:
        • fallacies are deficient arguments (traditional rhetorics)
        • today, fallacies are defined as the violation of rules in argumentation
        • thus in order to distinguish them a normative model is needed
        • Pragma-dialectics provides such rules
        • Critical questions are asked to determine at which point fallacious arguments become unacceptable
        • strategic manouvering are things arguers do to achieve their rhetorical and dialectic goals
      • Figures of speech
        • important instrument in political rhetoric and a main branch of rhetoric since antiquity
        • small rhetorical units, stylistic means
        • focus today is on the mechanisms and structures and are rather viewed as semiotic categories
        • 5 traditional categories:
          • simile
          • metaphor
          • hyperbole
          • personification
          • synecdoche
        • they can operate in different levels of speech:
          • phonetics/phonology (alliteration, assonance, consonance or onomatopoeia)
          • morphology (anaphora, anadiplosis, archaism, epiphora)
          • syntax (ellipsis, parallelism, chiasmus, asyndeton, polysyndeton)
          • semantics (euphemisms, metaphors, metonymies, personifications)
        • can also be categorized according to how they operate:
          • repetition
          • subtraction
          • permutation
          • substitution
      • metaphors:
        • traditionally viewed as subsets of FSP
        • however metaphors are no longer viewed as artificial ornaments in speech, but as instruments that organize the way we think and that are deeply entrenched in the human mind
        • they operate between congnition and emotion and thus provide an important strategy in political speeches
        • conceptual metaphors, which we use to structure our thinking:
          • war metaphors to convey politics
          • sickness or natural catastrophe metaphors to talk about crisis
      • Prospects:
        • computerised methods
        • analysis of large corpora of texts
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