Showing papers on "Rhetorical question published in 1997"

The rhetorical parsing of natural language texts

Abstract: We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

Charisma and rhetoric: Communicative techniques of international business leaders

Abstract: Although powerful rhetoric is often associated with charismatic leadership, little explanation is available of why leader rhetoric is related to charisma. One of the first studies to explicitly address this topic focused on speech content (Shamir. Arthur & House, 1994). Other elements contributing to the strong motivational and emotive effects of charismatic rhetoric are construction of the message, style and delivery. CEOs play an important part in creating and dispersing organizational values and visions to organization members and the external environment. Their speeches within and outside the company are important to motivate others and gain support for their vision. The CEOs in this study are from companies seeking different degrees and types of international involvement. Their corporate visions reflect different international business mentalities. This study explores how these charismatic CEOs rhetorically construct message content in their speeches, focusing on how their attitude towards internationalization and international business strategy is reflected. First, international strategy and attitudes towards internationalization as well as vision, charisma and rhetoric are discussed. Discourse analysis is described and examples of rhetorical devices are given from the analyzed speeches of the CEO's. Finally, part of a more extensive analysis of examples from speeches showing the rhetorical construction of messages reflecting their international strategy and management mentality are presented.

The Rhetorical Construction of Multilingual Students.

Abstract: The TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy

Abstract: Connors provides a history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today s practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language and life.Connors locates the beginning of a new rhetorical tradition in the mid-nineteenth century, and from there, he discusses the theoretical and pedagogical innovations of the last two centuries as the result of historical forces, social needs, and cultural shifts.This important book proves that American composition-rhetoric is a genuine, rhetorical tradition with its own evolving theria and praxis. As such it is an essential reference for all teachers of English and students of American education."

Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross Cultural Introduction

Abstract: This is the first book to offer a cross-cultural overview of rhetoric as a universal feature of expression and communication The author explores analogies to human rhetoric in animal communication, rhetorical factors in the origin of human speech, and rhetorical conventions in traditionally oral societies around the world The second part of the book discusses rhetoric as understood and practised in early literate cultures, seeking to identify what is unique or unusual in the western tradition

Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

Abstract: This book challenges standard accounts of early Christian exegesis of the Bible. Professor Young sets the interpretation of the Bible in the context of the Graeco-Roman world - the dissemination of books and learning, the way texts were received and read, the function of literature in shaping not only a culture but a moral universe. For the earliest Christians, the adoption of the Jewish scriptures constituted a supersessionary claim in relation to Hellenism as well as Judaism. Yet the debt owed to the practice of exegesis in the grammatical and rhetorical schools is of overriding significance. Methods were philological and deductive, and the usual analysis according to 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical' is inadequate to describe questions of reference and issues of religious language. The biblical texts shaped a 'totalizing discourse' which by the fifth century was giving identity, morality and meaning to a new Christian culture.

Representative form and the visual ideograph: The Iwo Jima image in editorial cartoons

Abstract: Much has been written about the iconic power of Joe Rosenthal's 1945 photograph of the flag‐raising at Iwo Jima. This scholarship, however, insufficiently accounts for the rhetorical function of this image as it is appropriated in an unusual number of recent editorial cartoons. Building upon rhetorical theory addressing repetitive form and visual metaphor, we propose a concept of representative form. Exemplifying representative form, the parodied Iwo Jima image operates as an instance of depictive rhetoric that functions ideographically.

Resisting whiteness' rhetorical silence

Abstract: This essay explores the rhetorical dimensions of whiteness in public political discourse from an ideological perspective. It analyzes a debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun and Jesse Helms over a patent extension for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia containing a Confederate flag. In this essay I argue that rhetoricians must do the critical and self‐reflexive ideological work necessary to make whiteness visible and overturn its silences for the purpose of resisting racism. To do this, scholars must locate interactions that implicate unspoken issues of race, discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is invoked but its explicit terminology is not, and investigate how these racialized constructions intersect with gender and class.

Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance

Abstract: After explaining how and why women have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn provides the opportunity for Sappho, Aspasia, Diotima, Hortensia, Fulvia, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, and Elizabeth I to speak with equal authority and as eloquently as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine. Her aim is nothing less than regendering and changing forever the history of rhetoric.To that end, Glenn locates women s contributions to and participation in the rhetorical tradition and writes them into an expanded, inclusive tradition. She regenders the tradition by designating those terms of identity that have promoted and supported men s control of public, persuasive discoursethe culturally constructed social relations between, the appropriate roles for, and the subjective identities of women and men.Glenn is the first scholar to contextualize, analyze, and follow the migration of women s rhetorical accomplishments systematically. To locate these women, she follows the migration of the Western intellectual tradition from its inception in classical antiquity and its confrontation with and ultimate appropriation by evangelical Christianity to its force in the medieval Church and in Tudor arts and politics."

Memories for sale : Nostalgia and the construction of identity in Old Pasadena

Abstract: The contemporary moment is characterized by a deep desire for memory. The shift of identity from traditional familial, community and work structures to “lifestyle” along with the fragmentation and globalization of postmodern culture engenders in many a profoundly felt need for the past. The loss of a culture of memory has been met by the rise of “memory places.” This essay argues that landscapes of memory like Old Pasadena respond to the fragmentation with memory created by contemporary culture. Classical and Renaissance rhetorical concepts provide the materials necessary for a critical analysis of contemporary landscapes of memory. The engagement between traditional rhetorical concepts and postmodern problems leads to a retheorizing and reevaluation of memory, invention and style, where memory becomes a grammar for the rhetorical performance of the self.

The New Public: Professional Communication and the Means of Social Influence

Abstract: Professional specialists, using market research and promotional campaigns, have come to dominate public communication. The modern public of the Enlightenment, based on free discussion, has, in Leon Mayhew's terms, been replaced by a 'New Public,' subject to mass persuasion through systematic advertising, lobbying, and other forms of media manipulation. Mayhew examines this sociological development in terms of discourse and social influence, offering an original theory which bridges Talcott Parsons and Jurgen Habermas. Most importantly, he shows how the rhetorical techniques of the professional communicators are designed to avoid having to defend their claims, thereby precluding meaningful discussion of public issues. As a result, institutions providing forums for good-faith, two-way discourse no longer exist, community through communication cannot be achieved, and the social order is unstable.

The Acts of the Apostles : A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary

Abstract: Like Ben Witherington's previous commentary"Conflict and Community in Corinth," this commentary breaks fresh ground in providing a detailed social and rhetorical analysis of the book of Acts. Written in a readable style, with more detailed interaction with scholarly discussion found in the various excursuses, this commentary draws on the best new insights from a number of disciplines (narratological studies of Luke-Acts, archaeological and social scientific study of the New Testament, rhetorical analysis of Acts, comparative studies in ancient historiography) to provide the reader with the benefits of recent innovative ways of analyzing the text of Acts. In addition there is detailed attention to major theological and historical issues, including the question of the relationship of Acts to the Pauline letters, the question of early Christian history and how the church grew and developed, the relationship between early Judaism and early Christianity, and the relationship between Christianity and the officials of the Roman Empire. Acts is seen as a historical monograph with affinities with the approaches of serious Greek historians such as Thucydides and Polybius in terms of methodology, and affinities with some forms of Jewish historiography (including Old Testament history) in terms of content or subject matter. The book is illustrated with various pictures and charts, which help to bring to light the character and setting of these narratives."

The Power and Politics of Genre

Abstract: Generic knowledge plays an important role in the packing and unpacking of texts used in a wide-ranging institutionalized socio-rhetorical context. If, on the one hand, it imposes constraints on an uninitiated genre writer to conform to the conventions and rhetorical expectations of the relevant professional community, on the other hand, it allows an experienced and established writer of the genre to exploit conventions to create new forms to suit specific contexts. Unfortunately, however, this privilege to exploit generic conventions to create new forms becomes available only to those few who enjoy a certain degree of visibility in the relevant professional community; for a wide majority of others, it is more of a matter of apprenticeship in accommodating the expectations of disciplinary cultures. This paper reviews current research to investigate the way the power and the politics of genre is often exploited by the so-called established membership of disciplinary communities to keep outsiders at a safe distance.

Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces: A Review of Studies That Use Cultural--Historical Activity Theory

Abstract: This article reviews a tradition of North American research on writing in higher education and workplaces that draws on cultural-historical activity approaches. Growing out of college composition courses, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, and technical writing courses, the research takes as its object the roles writing plays in various activities, particularly those activities in which writing most powerfully mediates work: academic disciplines, professions, and other large and powerful organizations of modern life. Genre is an important analytical category, defined not in terms of formal features hut in terms of typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent social situations. Researchers use qualitative and historical methods to trace the ways people create, appropriate, and recreate dynamic genres to mediate a wide range of social practices.

Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between Roman school texts and the socialization of the student into an elite man. I argue that composition and declamation communicated social values; in fact, the rhetorical education of the late republic and the empire was a process of socialization that produced a definite subjectivity in its elite participants. I treat two genres of Roman school texts: the expansions on a set theme known as declamation and the bilingual, Greek and Latin, writing exercises known as the colloquia amid the collections of hermeneumata. This article is more broadly concerned with the attitudes toward language use that are learned along with specific literacy skills. Habits of reading and writing and speaking are learned in scenes and contexts that contribute to concepts of the self and more widely of gender and social roles. The encounters and verbal interactions recurrently plot a deviation from violence or a return to civil and familial order through the proper verbal display of the elite speaker. The student speaker9s assumption of roles, his training in fictio personae, is a strong training in memory and imagination-pretending to be someone else, pretending to talk like someone else, or pretending to talk on behalf of someone else. That someone else is most important as the schoolboy becomes the voice of or for prostitutes, the raped, slaves, freedmen, women. His was not a neutral ventriloquism in the styles of Latin but a training in the master9s mode toward the ready conviction that the speaker can and must speak for others, his subordinates. Roman rhetorical education was a process of persona building, shaping the schoolboy in his future role while excluding others from the very right to become speaking subjects.

The Antidepressant Web

Abstract: This paper was conceived as chapters two and three of the still unwritten book, and as a basis for discussion on an Internet website and elsewhere. These chapters examine hard evidence relating to a wholly rhetorical and hypothetical question, "Do antidepressants work?" The question provides the broadest possible framework for looking at the meaning and values of medicine. Implicitly, the question also asks: what is better than nothing, and how much better are antidepressant drugs than the placebos they are compared with in clinical trials? Between the lines of the paper lie basic questions about the ethics, activities, performance and impact of the three main centres of power in medicine - government, professionals and the pharmaceutical industry. The underlying issue is whether people who are miserably unfulfilled, sad, anguished or depressed are in hands as safe as they might imagine or need.

The Rhetorical Parsing of Unrestricted Natural Language Texts

Abstract: We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural languages texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

Managing Gender: Affirmative Action and Organizational Power in Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Sport

Abstract: and frameworks from which to study diversity in organizations Readers more familiar with the literature and research on diversity may find some old ground covered in the volume, but there is still a good deal of freshness in the perspectives offered A noteworthy feature of the chapters, beyond their very useful literature reviews, is that they could stimulate future research The treatment of workplace diversity in the volume is neither superficial nor rhetorical, but theoretically rich There is much here for scholars looking for promising conceptual frames for studying the multiple facets and levels of diversity

Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric

Abstract: Employing the methodology successfully used to explore other social movements in America, this study examines the rhetorical foundation that motivated deaf people to work for social change during the past two centuries. The author begins by explaining her use of the term "social movement" in relation to the desire for change among deaf people, and analyzes the rhetoric they used, not limited to spoken language, to galvanize effective action. Central to the book is the struggle between the dominant hearing society and deaf people over the best means of communication, with the educational setting as the constant battleground. It first tracks the history of interaction between these two factions, highlighting the speaking majority's desire to compel deaf people to conform to "the human sciences" conventionality by learning speech. Then, it focuses on the development of the deaf social movement's ideology to seek general recognition of sign language as a valid cultural variation. Also, the influence of social movements of the 1960s and 70s is examined in relation to the changing context and perception of the deaf movement, as well as to its rhetorical refinement.

Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education

Abstract: This volume considers Isocrates' educational programme from the perspective of rhetorical theory and explores its relation to sociopolitical practices Illumining Isocrates' efforts to reformulate sophistic conceptions of rhetoric on the basis of the intellectual and political debates of his times, Takis Poulakos contends that the father of humanistic studies and rival educator of Plato crafted a version of rhetoric that gave the art an important new role in the ethical and political activities of Athens

Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception

Abstract: Contending that the hermeneutical tradition is not a purely modern German discipline, Kathy Eden argues instead that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric. Eden demonstrates how the early rhetorical model of reading, called "interpretatio scripti" by Cicero, has forget such enduring hermeneutical principles as meaning, context, and literary economy.

Self-expression and linguistic variation

Abstract: This article argues that self-expression is a crucial though heretofore largely overlooked part of the explanation for linguistic variation. Self-expression mediates between linguistic choices and social facts such as gender, occupation, linguistic ideology, and place of origin, as speakers use language not only to express their identification with or rejection of social groupings, but also to express their individuality. All language use is thus essentially idiosyncratic and syncretic. The point is illustrated with reference to case studies of the speech and writing of two Texas women who use language in public contexts. The article further argues for the sociolinguistic study of public modes of discourse in addition to “vernacular” modes, and for the need in sociolinguistic research for rhetorical as well as linguistic analysis. (Variation, self-expression, individuality, case studies, Texas, public speech)

The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism's Third Wave

Abstract: This essay focuses on the repeated rhetorical moves through which the third wave autobiographical subject seeks to be real and to speak as part ofacolhctive voice from the next feminist generation. Given that postmodernist, postructuralist, and multi-culturalist critiques have shaped the form and the content of third wave expressions of the personal., the study is ultimately concerned with the possibilities and limitations of such theoretical analysis for a third wave of feminist praxis.