Ethos and Pragmatics

Abstract

Ethos, the speaker’s image in speech is one of the three means of persuasion e stablished by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and is often studied in a loose way. Many scholars develop lists of self-images (ethos of a leader, modesty ethos, etc.), but few explain how one arrives at these types of ethos. This is precisely what the inferential approach described here intends to do. Considering, like many discourse analysts, that ethos is consubstantial with speech, this paper provides an overview of various types and subtypes of ethos and highlights how these can be inferred from the discourse. Mainly, we would like to point out that what the speaker says about him or herself is only a part of what has been called “said ethos”: inferential processes triggered by what the speaker says about collectivities, opponents, or the audience also help construct an ethos. This tool will be applied to analyze a corpus of Donald Trump’s tweets of 6 January 2021, the day of the assault on the Capitol. As the notion of inference is essential in creating ethos, the paper pleads for the integration of the study of this rhetorical notion in the field of pragmatics.