Rhetorical Analysis: Towards a Tropology of Reading

Abstract

philosophical discourse, also raises the question of the autonomy of linguistic discourse. Entrenched in a vocabulary borrowed from another discipline, i.e., from philosophy, linguistics unfolds, according to Benveniste, as a science du langage and as a science des langues.2 spite of divergences of opinion which often separate them, most American and European linguists would not contest Benveniste's acknowledgment of a debt to the Greek language and to Greek philosophy. For instance, Noam Chomsky, who apprehends linguistic theory from a mentalistic rather than speculative point of view, has occasionally called for a watchfulness whose roots are to be found in the philosophical strategy set forth by the Greek philosophers and, more precisely, by Plato. his investigation of criteria applicable to a generative grammar, Chomsky phrases the following concern: In short, we must be careful not to overlook the fact that surface similarities may hide underlying distinctions of a fundamental nature, and that it may be necessary to guide and draw out the speaker's intuition in perhaps fairly subtle ways before we can determine what is the actual character of his knowledge of his language or of anything else. Neither point is new (the former is a commonplace of traditional linguistic theory and analytic philosophy; the latter is as old as Plato's Meno): both are often overlooked.3 order to guide and draw out the speaker's intuition, Socrates resorts to the dialectical or argumentative mode. Dialectics is presented in the Phaedrus as being superior to Rhetoric: Socrates tells Phaedrus that the dialectical mode consists in an art of thinking through which the art of speaking, rhetoric, is to be grounded.4 the Art of Rhetoric and in the Poetics, Aristotle presents a reflection on