Showing papers on "Rhetorical question published in 2016"

Narrative Agency in Hashtag Activism: The Case of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract: Hashtag activism happens when large numbers of postings appear on social media under a common hashtagged word, phrase or sentence with a social or political claim. The temporal unfolding of these mutually connected postings in networked spaces gives them a narrative form and agency. Applying Karlyn Campbell’s propositions about rhetorical agency to the case of #BlackLivesMatter, this essay shows that narrative agency in hashtag activism derives from its narrative form as well as from its contents and social context. Narrative agency is communal, invented, skillful, and protean.

Emancipation and Rhetoric: The Perlocutions and

Abstract: Like Frege's distinction of sense and force in semantics, the central distinction of pragmatics is that between perlocutions and illocutions. AH speech acts theorists off er a version of this distinction, including Habermas in his theory of communicative action. However, whether or not there is such a distinction at ail remains an essentially disputed issue. In this paper I consider the importance of this distinction for analyzing both ideology and rhetoric, but in particular for analyzing one species of rhetorical speech for the purpose of changing beliefs, that engaged in by the social critic. To make these Substantive points, I must first consider important recent criticisms of Habermas's distinction, especially those of Erling Skjei and Allen Wood. While I agree with the core of both criticisms, I still think the distinction can be made along the lines that Strawson proposed. I argue that there is not a completely disjunctive, mutually exclusive set of properties defining each type of speech act. There are, and must be, overlapping, nontrivial features common to both. These common features are in fact crucial to the analysis of the sort of speech engaged in by social critics and emancipators. To show this, I argue for the existence of an interme

Discursive Constructions of Otherness in Populist Radical Right Political Blogs

Abstract: This article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti-immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people, of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highly familiar from previous research on radical right discourse. However, what seems to characterize populist radical right discourse in the Nordic context is the strong reliance on the rhetorical juxtaposition between the welfare system and immigration. Our study furthermore highlights how populist radical right politicians exploit the digital discursive tools provided by political blogging. These tools, first, create a sense of connectedness and mutual understanding between blogger and reader and, second, allow the blogger to convey messages that are hostile towards immigrants and ethnic minorities without expressing an explicit personal opinion. In combination, the features provided by political blogging and the discursive and rhetorical strategies that deny racism make discourse within a populist radical right political blog especially powerful and convincing. We conclude that research must be sensitive to this ‘digital discourse’, as it reaches a public far beyond the sphere of a political blog through its potential to spread and influence mainstream media.

Between abundance and marginalization: the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism

Abstract: Tracing what has become a profound and robust conversation among rhetorical critics, I argue in this essay that questions of race are of such central importance to rhetorical criticism that rhetorical critics must all now participate in a body of work I name racial rhetorical criticism. To make this argument, I trace three racial rhetorical projects, which I name hearing race, seeing race, and bounding race. I conclude with suggestions for future work: a turn toward comparative racial rhetorical studies, an amplification of historical racial rhetorical studies, and a broad partipation from rhetorical critics in racial rhetorical criticism.

Emotions in Institutional Work: A Discursive Perspective

Abstract: This article focuses on the dynamics and interplay of meaning, emotions, and power in institutional work. Based on an empirical study, we explore and elaborate on the rhetorical strategies of emotion work that institutional actors employ to mobilize emotions for discursive institutional work. In an empirical context where a powerful institutional actor is tasked with creating support and acceptance for a new political and economic institution, we identify three rhetorical strategies of emotion work: eclipsing, diverting and evoking emotions. These strategies are employed to arouse, regulate, and organize emotions that underpin legitimacy judgments and drive resistance among field constituents. We find that actors exercise influence and engage in overt forms of emotion work by evoking shame and pride to sanction and reward particular expedient ways of thinking and feeling about the new institutional arrangements. More importantly, however, the study shows that they also engage in strategies of discursive i...

'Of dialogue, that great and powerful art' : a study of the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England

Abstract: This thesis examines the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England. In 1681 when Henry Care established his periodical The Popish Courant he chose the format of a dialogue because people were ‘so set upon dialoging.’ Care’s choice of dialogue for his periodical is indicative of the popularity of dialogue in the seventeenth century. Yet, despite the popularity that dialogue enjoyed in this period it has not received comparative attention by scholars. This thesis seeks to address this gap and make two specific historiographical contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates how the digitization of early modern sources can enable scholars to approach literary history from perspectives that physical books prevent. Using the digital collections of Early English Books Online, British Periodicals Online, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online for its source material this thesis has used a database of dialogues to analyze the genre and provide contextual knowledge about the genre as a whole that can illuminate the rhetorical objectives behind specific uses of dialogue. This is particularly exposed in the final chapter that utilizes this contextual information to understand the appeal of dialogue in Roger L’Estrange’s Observator. Secondly this thesis adds to the growing number of studies of early modern genres such as pamphlets, newspapers, ballads, and chapbooks. The period under discussion was one of significant change in terms of political and social circumstances and this thesis demonstrates that dialogue was sensitive to these political events. By situating the dialogue within the broader print landscape of seventeenth-century England the thesis maps how dialogue adapted to changing circumstances with pamphlet dialogues, periodical dialogues, and dialogues of the dead, in particular emerging in response to social and political events. Looking at the dialogue in the context of other literary forms this thesis argues that the appeal of dialogue was its flexibility and ability to educate a broad range of people across all demographics of seventeenth-century England.

Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric

Abstract: Social media are increasingly important in protest movements for communication and organization. As such, scholars should consider these ephemeral messages as a tool for understanding such movements’ rhetoric. This article draws on Kjeldsen’s method for the critique of visual political rhetoric and adds consideration of intertextuality, synecdoche, and metaphor to demonstrate a method for the rhetorical analysis and a critique of Internet memes as visual, political rhetoric. The Pepper Spray Cop meme arising from Occupy Wall Street is presented as a case-study example. The article considers the centrality of the intertextual nature of memes as a unique form of visual rhetoric in activist contexts and contributes to the literature on user-generated and activist rhetoric.

Toward a Historical Consciousness: Following the Historic Turn in Management Thought:

Abstract: This paper explores the emerging “historic turn” in management theory by identifying epistemological and ontological areas of correspondence between business historians and organizational theorists. Three emerging constructs that hold high potential for bridging business history and management theory are identified: rhetorical history, organizational legacy, and ANTi-History. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need to nurture a broad-based and more inclusive “historical consciousness” in business history that expands our collective assumptions about the nature and function of historical knowledge.

The Acts Of The Apostles A Socio Rhetorical Commentary

Abstract: the acts of the apostles a socio rhetorical commentary is available in our digital library an online access to it is set as public so you can get it instantly. Our digital library hosts in multiple countries, allowing you to get the most less latency time to download any of our books like this one. Merely said, the the acts of the apostles a socio rhetorical commentary is universally compatible with any devices to read.

Nouns and Academic Interactions: A Neglected Feature of Metadiscourse

Abstract: Metadiscourse has received considerable attention in recent years as a way of understanding the rhetorical negotiations involved in academic writing. But while a useful tool in revealing something of the dynamic interactions which underlie persuasive claim making, it has little to say about the role of nouns in this process. We address this gap by exploring the rhetorical functions of what we call metadiscursive nouns (such as fact, analysis, belief) and by mapping them onto a model of metadiscourse. The study examines ‘metadiscursive noun + post-nominal clause’ patterns, one of the most frequent structures containing such nouns, in a corpus of 120 research articles across six disciplines. Developing a rhetorically based classification and exploring the interactive and interactional use of metadiscursive nouns, we show that they are another key element of metadiscourse, offering writers a way of organizing discourse into a cohesive flow of information and of constructing a stance towards it. These interactions are further shown to realize the epistemological assumptions and rhetorical practices of particular disciplines.

Identification With Characters, Elaboration, and Counterarguing in Entertainment-Education Interventions Through Audiovisual Fiction

Abstract: The aim of this article is to further knowledge of the explanatory processes of narrative persuasion in the field of health communication, using data obtained in a research study of entertainment-education based on audiovisual fiction. Participating in the study were 208 young persons between the ages of 14 and 20, randomly distributed to three different groups. Each of the groups was exposed to a different episode of the Colombian television series Revelados, desde todas las posiciones. The results showed that greater identification with the main character of the episode transmitting a prevention message was associated with greater cognitive elaboration, which in turn led to more favorable attitudes toward the topics addressed. However, counterarguing was not observed to play a significant mediating role. The findings of this study allow us to conclude that getting people to think and reflect can help persuade them, which suggests that narrative persuasion models and dual models of rhetorical persuasion can be compatible in certain contexts, such as when messages are designed in such a way that characters make explicit arguments that endorse a prosocial message through dialogues.

Enargeia in the ancient criticism of poetry

Abstract: It is quite common nowadays for scholars to use the word ecphrasis when referring to passages in ancient poetry which describe phenomena like objects, people, scenes, actions and works of art in a strikingly pictorial way. But excpQaaic was not the only term in ancient literary criticism to denote pictorial vividness in literature. Another was evacyeia, and the aims of this paper are to define it, to demonstrate its particular importance for all ancient literary theory, to examine the dating of its earliest usage and to make a suggestion about its origin1). The most thorough definition of evaqyeia is found in the comments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the rhetorical style of Lysias :

The linguistic patterns and rhetorical structure of citation context: an approach using n-grams

Abstract: Using the full-text corpus of more than 75,000 research articles published by seven PLOS journals, this paper proposes a natural language processing approach for identifying the function of citations. Citation contexts are assigned based on the frequency of n-gram co-occurrences located near the citations. Results show that the most frequent linguistic patterns found in the citation contexts of papers vary according to their location in the IMRaD structure of scientific articles. The presence of negative citations is also dependent on this structure. This methodology offers new perspectives to locate these discursive forms according to the rhetorical structure of scientific articles, and will lead to a better understanding of the use of citations in scientific articles.

Predicting the Rise and Fall of Scientific Topics from Trends in their Rhetorical Framing.

Abstract: Computationally modeling the evolution of science by tracking how scientific topics rise and fall over time has important implications for research funding and public policy. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying topic growth and decline. We investigate the role of rhetorical framing: whether the rhetorical role or function that authors ascribe to topics (as methods, as goals, as results, etc.) relates to the historical trajectory of the topics. We train topic models and a rhetorical function classifier to map topic models onto their rhetorical roles in 2.4 million abstracts from the Web of Science from 1991-2010. We find that a topic’s rhetorical function is highly predictive of its eventual growth or decline. For example, topics that are rhetorically described as results tend to be in decline, while topics that function as methods tend to be in early phases of growth.

From How to Why

Abstract: Ethnographers often start fieldwork by focusing on descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from `how?' to `why?' can be a dilemma, but the ethnographer's folk culture provides especially useful clues. By dwelling on their appreciation of especially luminous data, ethnographers can light the path to causal inference. In this, the second of a two-part article, four of seven forms for characterizing the rhetorical effectiveness of ethnographic data are illustrated and the distinctive resources they offer for causal explanation are analyzed.

The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity

Abstract: This article is a rhetorical analysis of the anxious and outraged discourse employed in response to the "rising tide" of cheating and plagiarism. This discourse invites actions that are antithetical to the goals of education and the roles of educators, as exemplified by the proliferation of plagiarism-detection technologies.

Metaphors in political discourse: A review of selected studies

Abstract: The use of metaphors in political discourse is a linguistic strategy that has been used all over the world. Studies on metaphor have therefore been done in various parts of the world. This paper reviewed studies on metaphor in political discourse to assess the role metaphor played in political discourse. It aimed to contribute to the field of metaphor in political discourse by reviewing studies done in this field. The study aimed to show that a metaphor as a linguistic tool could be manipulated both for pragmatic and strategic reasons. The review showed that metaphors were used to help the voting public to make sense of different political issues and therefore to express their general attitudes towards politics. Further, they helped to make citizens identify with and understand their beliefs and goals for their country. The mapping principle of source and target domains was further used by the politicians to fulfill their persuasive and rhetorical goals in political discourse. Apart from being used as a face-saving strategy, the review showed that metaphors also revealed speakers’ ideological positions. Key words: Politics, political discourse, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor.

Cultivating a Rhetorical Sensibility in the Translingual Writing Classroom

Abstract: Let me begin with two questions I would like to address in my contribution to this symposium:1. When we as teachers take a translingual approach to difference, are we expecting students to produce a particular kind of writing that mimics what we call code-meshing, or do we want students to develop a rhetorical sensibility that reflects a critical awareness of language as a contingent and emergent, rather than a standardized and static, practice?2. To what extent, if any, should we engage our students in explicit conversations about translingualism in the context of other approaches to language difference, and what consequences are likely to emerge from such conversations?The answer to the first question, I think, reflects a concept of translingualism as something more than an empty performance meant to fulfill a particular set of teacherly expectations about how we use language. It is a concept that reflects the belief that every student needs to develop a critical awareness about what language does, rather than what it is, in the context of very specific circumstances informed-as the second question suggests-by a critical awareness of the choices made in the context of the various competing ideological approaches to language difference currently available to us. Let me use a recent experience in the classroom to frame the concerns I raise here.Four years ago in an advanced undergraduate class I taught titled "Language Variation and Language Policy in North America" at the University of Washington, I had the thirty-four students in the class read Bruce Horner et al.'s opinion piece "Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach" the week before class began so that we could use it as a lens through which we would read and discuss a series of journal articles and book chapters on language variation and language policy. On the basis of the Horner et al. essay, along with ideas from other scholars like Alex Kostogriz who have written about transcultural literacy, I had students in class consider three competing ideological approaches to language and cultural difference that together form what Pierre Bourdieu calls a battlefield, that is, "an arena of struggle through which agents and institutions seek to preserve or overturn the existing distribution of capital" (Wacquant 268).To make these approaches more readily accessible, I framed them as a continuum with a monolingual/monocultural approach at one end, a multilingual/multicultural approach in the middle, and a translingual/transcultural approach at the other end. Because I do not have the space or time here to describe these perspectives in detail, I hope it suffices to say that each of them represents a set of ideological beliefs, values, and practices that attempts to influence how we/students construct our/their notions of language and culture and deploy them in academic writing and beyond. I will add that I decided to present these approaches to my students explicitly to make sure I familiarized them with the ideological terrain that impinges on the choices speakers and writers need to make as they navigate and negotiate the competing ideologies that continuously hail them. In an effort to address the challenges our students encounter as readers, writers, and rhetoricians when they face these circumstances, I am going to look at the writing and reported perceptions of one of the students from my class in the course of addressing the two questions I asked at the outset. I should note that writing for the class consisted of two short self-reflective essays about students' own language use, a midterm essay where I asked them to critique the position Horner et al. take in their opinion piece, and a final research essay on a topic of their choice. Here I will only discuss the writing this student did in the self-reflective and midterm essays.In her first self-reflective essay, Mina Nokeo (a pseudonym) wrote the following:It's Sunday morning and my family is getting ready for church. …

Against the Heresy of Immanence: Vatican’s ‘Gender’ as a New Rhetorical Device against the Denaturalisation of the Sexual Order

Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, the Vatican contests the concept of gender as forged by feminists to study social arrangements through which the sexual order is naturalised. This contestation came with the distortion of the analyses and claims formulated by feminists and LGBTQ scholars and social movements. This article understands the Vatican’s invention of ‘gender ideology’ as a new rhetorical device produced both to delegitimise feminist and LGBTQ studies and struggles and to reaffirm that sexual norms transcend historical and political arrangements. It also investigates how the transnationality of this discursive construct relates to the specific features it has taken in two different national contexts – France and Italy. The article is structured as follows: it first highlights the logic and structure of the anti-gender discourse. Then, it analyses how the same argumentative device is performed in anti-gender demonstrations. Finally, it scrutinises the rhetorical and performative strategies through which anti-gender actors have formulated their views and argues that ‘gender ideology’ can be understood as a political reaction against the entry of minorities into the fields of politics and theory .

A Comparison of Rhetorical Move Structure of Applied Linguistics Research Articles Published in International and National Thai Journals.

Abstract: The rhetorical organization of research articles has attracted extensive attention in genre study, and the focus of move-based analysis is on the textual function. The primary aim of the present st...

The Ethics of Immersive Journalism: A rhetorical analysis of news storytelling with virtual reality technology

Abstract: This paper provides background on and raises ethical challenges in regard to virtual reality technology as a journalistic tool. The realistic and empathy-generating nature of 360-degree filmed news story experiences arguably changes the role and responsibilities of both the journalist and the viewer participating in the story. Using Clouds Over Sidra, an award-winning long-form VR documentary as the model for analysis, this paper examines how VR may change cultural communication. The influence and impact this new medium may have are important to examine for its impact on the way that subjects portray, journalists capture, and consumers learn about news.

The Ubiquitous Presidency: Toward a New Paradigm for Studying Presidential Communication

Abstract: The rhetorical presidency—a deeply influential paradigm for understanding presidential communicative governance—has been disrupted by dramatic changes in the U.S. electorate, the media environment, the goals of public appeals, and the nature of political content. To address the rhetorical presidency’s limitations with regard to current presidential communication practices, we conceptualize and offer a preliminary test of a new paradigm: the ubiquitous presidency. This paradigm argues that modern presidents cultivate a highly visible and nearly constant presence in political and nonpolitical arenas of American life by being accessible, personal, and pluralistic.

Rhetoric of epistemic authority: Defending field positions during the financial crisis

Abstract: In this article we explore how elite actors respond to a field-wide crisis. Drawing from a study of CEOs of large US banks in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, we show how elite actors use rhetorical strategies to defend their dominant position in the field. Specifically, we show how actors strengthen their epistemic authority – the perceived expertise and trustworthiness of an actor – through four distinct but interwoven rhetorical strategies. Actors used two internally-directed means of strengthening epistemic authority by providing rational guarantees and expressing normative responsibilities, and two externally-directed strategies that sought to strengthen their own epistemic authority by lowering the epistemic authority of others through critiquing judgments and questioning motives. We contribute to research on defensive institutional work by highlighting how elite actors rhetorically defended their position following a field-wide crisis.

Reports in Discourse

Abstract: Attitude or speech reports in English with a non-parenthetical syntax sometimes give rise to interpretations in which the embedded clause, e.g., "John was out of town" in the report " Jill said that John was out of town", seems to convey the main point of the utterance while the attribution predicate, e.g., " Jill said that", merely plays an evidential or source-providing role (Urmson, 1952). Simons (2007) posits that parenthetical readings arise from the interaction between the report and the preceding discourse context, rather than from the syntax or semantics of the reports involved. However, no account of these discourse interactions has been developed in formal semantics. Research on parenthetical reports within frameworks of rhetorical structure has yielded hypotheses about the discourse interactions of parenthetical reports, but these hypotheses are not semantically sound. The goal of this paper is to unify and extend work in semantics and discourse structure to develop a formal, discourse-based account of parenthetical reports that does not suffer the pitfalls faced by current proposals in rhetorical frameworks.

‘Under Heavy Manners?’: Social Work, Radicalisation, Troubled Families and Non-Linear War

Abstract: The “war on terror” signalled a new type of warfare, one that accorded with the features of what Surkov argues is non-linear war Pomerantsev (2014). Traditional war, that takes place in a particular geographical location, with an identifiable enemy, is no more. Instead, warfare is a more fluid phenomenon. The paper argues that Surkov’s concept can be usefully applied to current developments in social work practice in the UK. We trace the origins of key anti-terrorist policy developments in the UK (PREVENT and CHANNEL) from the war on terror and argue that such policies have serious implications for social work. We argue that there is an increasing securitisation approach in addressing modern social problems. We describe these as reflecting conflationary rhetorical logic, notably, the linking of Troubled Families programmes with “terror”. The paper concludes that social workers, need to firstly recognise tactics at play in the state of non-linear war, secondly, become critically aware of conflationary rhetorical turns in political discourse, third: actively resist securitised discourses and lastly, reject discriminatory notions of so called dangerous people and communities. In other words, we should actively re-engage with and promote social work values and social justice.

Rhetoric of pictorial place : fictive architecture and persuasion in Altichiero da Zevio's Oratory of St George and Fra Angelico's Nicholas V Chapel

Abstract: Historiography has tended to neglect architecture in painting, or to envisage it as a lesser counterpart to built architecture and as a means to create pictorial space. This study seeks to redress the lack of research on architectural settings, arguing for the agency of fictive structures and proposing rhetorical theory and place, rather than space, as heuristic tools for their interpretation. It offers four main contributions to scholarship on Italian medieval and Renaissance painting. Firstly, it illustrates how fictive architecture creates place, constructs the narrative, and engages with the viewer. Secondly, it clarifies the relationship between place and architecture in painting by identifying and qualifying two main approaches to the representation of place: portrait of place and hybrid place. Thirdly, it explores the communicative capacity of fictive buildings, demonstrating the rhetorical power of the structures in Altichiero’s Oratory in Padua and Fra Angelico’s Chapel in the Vatican, and illustrating the potential of a rhetorical approach for the interpretation of architecture in painting. Fourthly, it contributes to bridging the historiographical gap between fourteenth and fifteenth-century art. The thesis opens with an analysis of how place was understood in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy, revealing the complexity and metaphorical valence of the word 'luogo' and underscoring the rhetorical nature of fictive architectural places. This study posits that rhetoric pervaded late medieval and Renaissance Italian culture, arguing that Trecento Padua and Quattrocento Rome were particularly receptive environments to rhetorical culture and deploying seven rhetorical terms as interpretative instruments. These seven rhetorical terms, selected from primary sources, clarify how artists created fictive architectural places, and help to scrutinise the possible meanings and messages that painted architectural place conveys. By emphasising the central role of architecture in painting, its crucial relationship with place-making, and its powers of persuasion, the thesis demonstrates the relevance of the architectural imagination of artists for a better understanding of painting, built structures and the articulation and perception of architectural identity in this period.