Rhetoric Research Articles

Black Women's Rights-Blurring Strategies in a Culture of Rights Discrimination

Abstract This article examines the case of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant house in Oakland, California as an attempt to advance a human right to housing. It argues that the U.S. penchant for rights discrimination, the idea that one must choose between whose and which rights matter, contributes to the need for a rhetorical strategy of rights-blurring. Building on previous scholarship that establishes a history of Black women connecting civil rights to human rights as a rhetorical strategy in the United States, this article explains how rights-blurring actually operates. It also demonstrates how this strategy functions in conversations about property rights in the United States and in the context of a twenty-first century direct-action protest.

Language and Persuasion: An Exploratory Analysis of Rhetorical Elements in Celebrities’ Social Media Posts

This paper adapted the framework of rhetorical devices developed by Michalik-Suchanek to examine the language used in social media posts of Ghanaian celebrities, focusing specifically on the use of rhetorical elements. Instagram and Twitter were chosen as the primary platforms for analysis due to their popularity among Ghanaians. The dataset consisted of posts from 15 Ghanaian celebrities, sourced from either one or both platforms. The study adopted the embedded mixed-methods approach. A total of 130 celebrity posts from Instagram and 70 from Twitter, all from April 2022, were collected using mobile phones and laptops through an observational guide. Through a critical analysis of the sampled data, 22 rhetorical devices were identified, with syntactic devices being the most commonly used. The study revealed that most Ghanaian celebrities prefer to use Standard English in their posts. It was also revealed that these rhetorical devices were employed by celebrities to establish unique relationships with their followers, persuade them to take action, express intentions, caption videos and pictures, and enhance the overall meaning of their posts. The research showed that the use of rhetorical devices was effective in enriching the language of the posts. Based on these findings, it was recommended that further studies be conducted to explore the use of rhetorical elements in social media posts of politicians, businesspeople, entertainers, and other public figures in Ghana. Such studies would contribute to a deeper understanding of how rhetorical strategies are employed in the digital communication landscape. This study contributes to existing knowledge on social media research conducted in Ghana. Keywords: Rhetorical Elements, Language, Persuasion, Celebrities, Social Media, Ghana

From Ancient Zhiguai Tales to Contemporary Animation: A Study of Visual Rhetoric in ‘Yao-Chinese Folktales’ (2023)

This study delves into the use of visual rhetorical strategies in 中国奇谭 Zhongguo Qitan ‘Yao-Chinese Folktales’ (2023), particularly focusing on 鹅鹅鹅 E E E ‘Goose Mountain’ (henceforth ‘Goose’) directed by Hu Rui. We assert that ‘Goose’ transcodes and reinterprets the ancient Chinese zhiguai novella 阳羡书生 Yangxian Shusheng ‘The Scholar from Yangxian’ (henceforth ‘Scholar’) for a contemporary audience through the use of visual rhetoric, leading to a compelling contemporary rendition of this tale. As a silent animation, ‘Goose’ does so by adeptly incorporating visual depictions, especially animal-related imagery and ink painting aesthetics, drawn from the broader traditional zhiguai myths, or tales of the strange and traditional Chinese culture. The core argument hinges on visual rhetoric’s transformative potential. In ‘Goose’, the connection between tradition and contemporaneity is established through metaphor and metonymy. Initially a literary figure of speech, metaphor and metonymy now encompasses ‘visual rhetoric’, widely applied in interpreting visual arts. Visual rhetoric often employs various elements such as colour, shape, size, objects, composition and texture to convey information. This study highlights the role played by the inseparable link between traditional zhiguai narratives, the minzu/national style, and the contemporary animation technology in ‘Goose’, a transformative role that revitalizes ancient traditions to resonate with today’s viewership.

Reality Amidst Rhetoric: Implementation of ECtHR Judgments in the UK

Abstract This article concerns the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the United Kingdom. The rhetoric of politicians who object to the Court and raise problems with the implementation of its judgments is contrasted with the reality of implementation. It is shown that the UK is a good international citizen which takes its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights seriously. Problems with implementation, such as those raised by the prisoner voting judgment, Hirst (No 2), are useful tools for politicians seeking to provoke anti-European sentiment. However, with this judgment now implemented, this strategy is no longer as successful as it once was.

The Critical Analysis of the Lesotho Language Planning and Policy and Its Implications on Education

The paper aimed at analysing the Lesotho language policy to unmask how power is assumed to be exercised by the Lesotho policy-makers through linguistic elements and structure .The main analytical tool of this paper was critical sociolinguistics, using IGMs in Systemic Functional Linguistics, rhetorical strategies and the CDA model in which the paper analysed the relationship between discourse and society. The paper unveiled performativity (mode, censorship and interpellation and the grammatical aspects from the point of functions of co-ordination, modality and nominalisation as effective and dominant principles and tropes used by the Lesotho language policy makers to convince the citizens to acknowledge the language policy irrespective of how it overshadows the minority languages in Lesotho.

Statelessness and Solidarity: Palestinians, Dhofaris, and Saharawis in Tricontinental Media

Abstract From its beginning, the Organisation of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (ospaaal) used its print media to campaign on behalf of Palestinian nationalism, articulating the concerns of displaced Palestinians from a perspective of unrecognised and thwarted national liberation movements. This organisation, responsible for carrying out the activities of the Tricontinental group that began meeting in Havana in 1966, identified the issue of Palestinian statelessness as a key feature of ongoing colonialism. From this perspective, ospaaal developed a platform from which to articulate solidarity against ongoing imperialism, one which could be usefully extended to explain and render solidarity with other causes. We argue that ospaaal’s visual and narrative framework, extended to the anti-colonial advocacy first for Dhofar (from the late 1960s to middle of the 1970s) and later for Western Sahara (late 1970s to 1990), presented a powerful, though limited, critique of international governance institutions from the Global South. Tricontinental publications’ reporting and solidarity media, in framing statelessness as an inherent problem of an incomplete process of decolonisation, critiqued the rhetorical strategies employed by imperial powers to maintain colonial relationships through international organisations like the United Nations.

Do not Ignore the Embarrassed Elephant in the Room: Empathic Rhetorical Strategies Used by Andrological Clinical Physicians in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Do not Ignore the Embarrassed Elephant in the Room: Empathic Rhetorical Strategies Used by Andrological Clinical Physicians in Traditional Chinese Medicine

The Global Institutionalization of Human Rights Discourse: A Cross-national Analysis of the Language used in the International Labour Conference during the Cold War

ABSTRACT Although human rights discourse has become a central element of international political rhetoric, the process through which it came to reach its contemporary importance is disputed. In this article, that process is examined by conducting a cross-national analysis of the language used at sessions of the International Labour Conference during the Cold War. Although the mainstream understanding is that human rights discourse diffused ‘from the West to the rest’, here it is argued that the global proliferation of human rights discourse can best be explained by the existence of world culture in which actors engage in ‘epistemic governance’. In other words, to advance their own aspirations actors try to shape the way in which others perceive reality by utilizing well-respected values in their argumentation. The values invoked become increasingly institutionalized and thus more useful for epistemic governance, leading to a synchronization of those discourses in international politics. Although actors from different ideological, cultural, and political backgrounds have emphasized different rights and topics when invoking human rights, these invocations almost exclusively drew from the same globally shared understanding of human rights’ importance and essence.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Biden's Speech on the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan

The study analyses Vice President Joe Biden's address to the UN General Assembly on the United States' departure from Afghanistan. The study uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the speech's language and rhetoric to reveal the hidden ideologies and beliefs that informed its development. The dynamic interplay between rhetoric and policy decisions and their broader ramifications in international relations and domestic understanding is the primary focus of this inquiry. Our research places the exact wording, words, and rhetorical methods against more extensive historical, geopolitical, and societal backgrounds. This research provides important insights into the complex interaction between political rhetoric, public perception, and policy repercussions by bridging these concepts with real-world effects. Especially for major foreign policy decisions, the findings illuminate how political narratives, when appropriately analyzed, disclose deeper levels of intention, rationale, and global strategy.

The outsider: Outsider rhetoric and truth-seeking in The Profession of Faith

Efforts to identify oneself as an “outsider” are an increasingly visible feature of the democratic political environment, and perhaps no political thinker has utilized outsider rhetoric to greater effect than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That said, virtually no attention has been paid to the important role that such rhetoric plays in a work that Rousseau believed to be the “best and most useful” of the Eighteenth Century— The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. In this article I attend to the vicar's use of outsider tropes, focusing in particular on how they serve to legitimate an account of truth-seeking which would otherwise be rejected by the vicar's skeptical audience. I also show how the vicar's understanding of the conditions necessary to proper truth-seeking are different from Rousseau's own. This argument, if successful, illustrates the intrinsically rhetorical character of The Profession as well as calling attention to the presence of an important though neglected rhetorical strategy. In achieving these dual aims, this essay contributes both to the growing literature on The Profession and highlights neglected aspects of Rousseau's own rhetorical strategies.

«Очевидно, что …»: бустинг как стратегия экспликации уверенности автора в достоверности пропозиции (корпусный анализ жанра «аннотация к научной статье»)

The article analyzes linguistic means used for boosting which is considered a crucial metadiscourse strategy regularly employed in the genre of research article abstracts. The study aims at identifying the types of booster and the frequency of occurrence of boosting markers in Russian-language research article abstracts in the field of soft and hard sciences. The study makes an attempt to reveal differences in the use of these metadiscourse patterns and suggest reasons for the uneven distribution of boosters in the two corpora. The study is based on the assumption that disciplinary conventions affect the choice of rhetorical strategies. The study draws on a corpus of 180 research article abstracts published in 12 soft and hard science journals. The theoretical basis of the study is the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers proposed by Hyland. The findings showed that soft science authors used boosting markers much less frequently than their hard science counterparts. Differences were also revealed in terms of the types of boosting. The results of the analysis confirmed the assumption that boosting as a metadiscourse strategy is determined by disciplinary conventions. The results obtained can be used both by teachers of academic writing and academic writing course designers and become an avenue for further research into metadiscourse as an important rhetorical strategy.

How Elites Mobilize the Vernacular: A Case Study of Australian Prime Ministers' Use of ‘Fair Go’ Rhetoric

Abstract Prime ministers often use vernacularisms in their political rhetoric, but we know little about how they deploy these forms of speech and the consequences for politics and policy. This article extends work on the ‘rhetorical PM’ by focusing on how leaders deploy idiomatic expressions in their oratory. The article presents a thematic analysis of four successive Australian prime ministers' use of the country's distinctive ‘fair go’ expression in speeches and media interviews between 1972 and 1996. Australian PMs increasingly invoked the ‘fair go’ expression throughout this period for multiple rhetorical purposes, including to make national identity claims, engage in partisan competition and justify policy reforms with strong neoliberal elements. While prevailing scholarship sees ‘vernacular politics’ as a tool of grassroots actors opposing discourses of globalization and elite-driven reform, this research shows the vernacular is a versatile rhetorical tool mobilized by elites for multiple purposes, including to justify radical policy change.

Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays

Passion episodes such as the Buffeting are known for the powerful acts of compassion they occasioned within audiences through their performance of violence on the person of Jesus. Few critics, however, have considered that these episodes depend on antisemitic, Islamophobic, and anti-Black depictions of antagonists when engendering such emotional dispositions. By investigating the dynamics of mockery through a deeper look into the composite identities of Jesus’s antagonists, this study reveals that these plays and the communities that produced them rely on a disingenuous stance of victimhood for their effectiveness. This ‘victim play’—the collaborative community effort to claim the status of victim while simultaneously participating in the victimization of others—obscures that those who are attributed cruel acts of mockery are actually its targets. The powerful rhetorical strategies of the premodern English episodes are thus unearthed in this study.

Economic nationalists, regional investment aid, and the stability of FDI-led growth in East Central Europe

ABSTRACT Although economic nationalist governments in East Central Europe (ECE) have strongly challenged FDI-dependence, FDI-led growth has remained stable across the region. The political economy literature explains this puzzle with enduring business-state elite interactions and the disciplining role of the EU. Instead, we show that the EU’s regional investment aid rules, which provide central governments in relatively backward member states with considerable policy space, serve as the main policy tool for reinforcing FDI-dependence. Using a unique dataset on regional investment aid granted between 2004 and 2022 in the Visegrád countries (V4), we show that each government, regardless of its ideological background, granted the vast majority of this type of aid to foreign firms. In addition, contrary to their political rhetoric, economic nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland outperformed their non-nationalist counterparts in granting aid to foreign firms. This suggests an instrumental use of this transnationally rooted policy opportunity: as their European political isolation grew, economic nationalists increasingly resorted to the promotion of foreign firms because the continued inflow of foreign capital has a legitimising effect both at home and abroad.

South African Land Reforms Under the Auspices of the “Radical Economic Transformation”

Abstract The land question is an emotive issue across the world. At independence, erstwhile colonies adopted land reforms to address colonial imbalances in landholding. South Africa is one such country that has embarked on land reforms with the view to correcting economic imbalances created by the apartheid past. However, land reform in South Africa has not only been slow but has failed to deal with the twin challenges of poverty and inequality. Using qualitative research design and neoclassical theory, this paper investigates South Africa’s land reforms under the auspices of radical economic transformation. The paper argues that the wholesale expropriation of land without compensation does not fit into the obtaining (neoliberal) economic blueprint that has dominated the country over the years. The call for a radical transformation of landholding rights in the country without structural changes in macroeconomic management remains political rhetoric.

The Eyes and Ears of Sexual Exploitation Online: Are Sex Buyers Part of the Prevention Puzzle to Reduce Harms in the Online Sex Industry?

Abstract UK efforts to prevent modern slavery and sexual exploitation online include assessing Adult Service Websites’ (ASWs) moderation and prevention responsibilities. Yet little is known about the role of sex buyers, as the political rhetoric assumes they are sexual offenders within the neo-abolitionist context (Serughetti 2013). Drawing from a large-scale study looking at ASWs’ responsibilities in preventing sexual exploitation online, this article shares findings from a survey with 142 sex buyers, understanding their role in this arena. Buyers possess detailed knowledge of sex working practices and indicators of exploitation. Thus, as actors in the prevention puzzle, they are uniquely positioned to understand how regulation can assist in crime prevention but equally create unintended consequences for the consensual sex industry online.

Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond

Abstract The paper emphasizes the pragmatic and discursive extensions of a special verbal structure – at its origin, a Future Tense form – known in Romanian linguistics as presumptive mood (hereinafter: PRESUMPT). In terms of evidentiality, the PRESUMPT has two types of meanings: an inferential meaning, expressing an inference-based supposition, and also a reportative meaning, when the utterer does not take responsibility for the truthfulness of information from another source. These significances are very subtle and closely related to their context of use. That is why, sometimes, it is very difficult to distinguish one value from another. Therefore, Romanian PRESUMPT deploys in discourse pragmatic enrichments depending on the syntactic-enunciative structure it is inserted in or on some other parameters, such as: speaker’s epistemic stance, genre of discourse, intersubjectivity, and extends its core meaning of evidentiality through a range of discursive dimensions. Considering this situation, our approach outlines that a complex rhetorical strategy is involved in such contexts, where the PRESUMPT actualizes in fact only its prototypical feature [+placement in a subsequent relation (“ultériorité” – see Bres 2012. Conditionnel et ultériorité dans le passé: De la subjectivité à l’objectivité. In SHS Web of Conferences, Volume 1 (3ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française), 1719–1730.)], exclusively marking the relation of subsequence of the hypothesis or of the quoted speech act (in counter-argumentative frames) compared to a previously mentioned state of facts.

Rhetorical Strategies and Speech Acts Analysis: A Linguistic Research on Indonesia’s Minister Speech Advocating for Palestine

This research is aimed at finding out the use of rhetorical strategies and speech acts in the speech delivered by the minister of foreign affairs during United Nations General Assembly regarding the conflict between Palestine and Israel. This research applies qualitative method. The data taken was in the form of text from H.E Retno LP Marsudi’s speech that emphasized the stance and the concern from Indonesia as a country which supports the freedom of the Palestine as well as condemning any kinds of genocide The result of this research showed that there were two linguistic features employed in the H.E Retno LP Marsudi’s speech i.e rhetorical strategies and speech act with the proportion of 32% for each Pathos Ethos, and 37% for Logos. Besides, the 5 speech acts were also found in this research with the proportion of 13% for assertive and declarative, 31% for directive, 25% for expressive, and 19% for commissive. This is to prove that rhetorical devices are considered to contribute to the overall persuasiveness and impact of the speech to help the speaker conveying the message effectively and build a comprehensive engagement to the audience.

The Discursive Clash Between the Portraits of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire in Relation to Their Foreign Policy: The ‘Victorious’ Turkey Versus the ‘Defeated’ Ottoman Empire

This article argues that the Turkish press of the early republican years was one of the instruments used by the Turkish political discourse of the early republican years to disseminate and reproduce its values in the public sphere. This article attempts to examine the discursive distinction between Turkey and the Ottoman Empire in terms of their international relations through the Turkish press discourse. To this end, this article focuses on the Turkish newspaper column "Sabah Gazeteleri ne diyorlar?" published in the Turkish newspaper Haber Akşam Postası on June 11, 1938, and conducts an argumentation analysis of the column by applying the Vienna School of Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Wodak 1990, 1994; Wodak & Meyer 2001; Wodak & Chilton 2005; Wodak et al. 2009). This article examines the rhetorical, discursive, and argumentative strategies used by the editorial writer Asım Us to persuade readers. One of the key findings of the article is the following: the negative portrayal of the Ottoman Empire versus the positive portrayal of Turkey. While the Ottoman Empire was described as "defeated" in World War I, Turkey was portrayed as a "victorious" country that was able to sign the Treaty of Lausanne with the Entente powers on an equal footing.

Prosodic features of public speech in Chinese political discourse

The article addresses the prosodic features of Chinese political speech, conducting an in-depth analysis through the lens of existing research by Ukrainian and Chinese linguists. The scientists emphasize the pivotal role of prosodic characteristics of political speech in shaping the audience’s perception of the speech text within the realm of political discourse. The study delves into the concept of political discourse in modern linguistics, dissecting its features and associated political rhetoric. It emphasizes the vital role of prosody and its pragmatic influence in political communication, substantiating the importance of employing prosodic means in the construction of political speech to outline the dominants of the text content and emotional impact on the listener. The author determines prosody as a crucial component of political discourse and finds out that Chinese political speech is characterized by a pronounced logical and phrasal accentuation, slower speaker’s speech rate, and longer pauses before and after semantically significant words and phrases that are of important semantic significance for the entire speech. Notably, the research findings demonstrate that the speaker changes the rhythm of the statement in order to overcome monotony and draw attention to the significant parts of the speech. Illustrating these findings with examples from the speech deliveredby Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2022 to representatives of the Chinese Communist Party, the study shows how the rhythmical adjustments in the speaker’s statement effectively mitigate monotony. The author determines the specifics of the implementation of Chinese-language political discourse through the mechanism of prosody and concludes that the effectiveness of public speech depends on its sound patterns, demonstrating their capacity to enhance imagery and expressiveness of speech.