Rhetorical Devices Research Articles

Geopolitical Narratives of Withdrawal and the Counter-Narrative of Women's Rights Activism in Afghanistan

Abstract Gendered narratives are political narratives that frequently frame decisions to go to war or broker peace. Such geopolitical narratives both enable the protection of women's rights and violate them. Women's rights, specifically, have been used as a rhetorical device by security policymakers to persuade people of the urgency and legitimacy of foreign intervention or withdrawal. We explore how gendered, geopolitical narratives work to construct understandings of political reality and delimit foreign policy options, and how counter-narratives contest them, transforming the available policy options. Drawing on narrative analysis frameworks, we examine the shifting narratives invoking “Afghan women” that facilitated the change in US policy on Afghanistan between 2018 and 2021 and the consequent return of the Taliban. In response to the US withdrawal, we investigate the counter-narrative of Afghan women that emphasizes universal human rights, inclusive peace, and international recognition of the situation of “gender apartheid.” We argue that counter-narratives supported by political strategies are an effective instrument for empowering marginalized women and legitimizing their activism that protests the continuation of war against women despite the end of military war.

The Conflict between Individuals and Society in Seize the Day

This paper explores the existential problem in Seize the Day—the conflict between individuals and society in modern society. With a brief introduction of Saul Bellow and the novel, the paper emphasizes the analysis of the conflict and the sources of the conflict. Besides, Saul Bellow uses many rhetorical devices to intensify the conflict. The analysis of these rhetorical devices is beneficial for us to interpret and understand the true meaning of the novel. Through the study of Bellow’s vision and the novel’s metaphorical meaning, we may find an effective solution to the conflict that our human being is involved in, and realize the social values of this novel.

Transmogrification as a Gendered Event: Women in Kona and Hausa Tales

African tales are characteristically told to amuse and to instil moral values in the younger generation. However, Jukun Kona and Hausa female narrators fashion gender-based stories from incidents that go beyond immediate and common happenings to speak of hybridization and transformations from plant/animal to human form with the cryptic mission to criticize the gendered status quo. These female narrators typically weave these tales from their imaginations or draw their ideas from occurrences within their immediate environments to showcase extant predicaments of women. This article uses the close reading technique which affords the facility to draw from the diction, tone, narrative voice, and rhetorical and literary devices in a given text to advance its argument. The evidence, as discovered in Hausa tales recollected from memory and Kona tales collected during fieldwork in 2018, illustrates that transmogrification is drawn on by female narrators to subtly critique communal gendered norms.

A Cooperative Principle Analysis of Rhetorical Devices in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

This paper aims to investigate the analysis of rhetorical devices pragmatically in terms of cooperative principle in particular its non-observance of conversational maxims in selected texts of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar play. In this research, the mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approaches was employed to describe and search for the rhetorical devices in the play, then for displaying the frequencies of rhetorical devices resulting from the observance of conversation maxims a table was drawn manually. However, the SPSS software version 22 is utilized to demonstrate the number and percentages of each maxim being broken. Next, the data were analysed. The pragmatic theory used to examine rhetorical devices is Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle which includes the four maxims of quality, quantity, relevance, and manner; and non-observance such as flouting, violating, opting out, suspending and infringing.

Halil Altındere’s Space Refugee: Martian Modernism, Syrian Resettlement, and Life After Climate Change

Halil Altındere proposes in his video Space Refugee (2016) that Syrian refugees resettle on Mars to escape the dire environmental and political circumstances of Earth. Through a visual analysis of the Martian landscapes and built environments featured in Altındere’s video, I examine how the artist evokes the overlapping visual languages and rhetorical devices used to frame the construction of real and imagined cities in the UAE and on Mars. I argue that Altındere’s Martian landscape brings together features of Gulf modernism in Dubai and Abu Dhabi with elements of historical Islamicate architectures to imagine a Martian modernism that subverts repressive conditions on earth and offers social transformation. I theorize and contextualize Altındere’s vision of a utopian Martian life for Syrian refugees through the framework of Martian modernism. This critical lens elucidates how the visual features, living conditions, and ideological motivations of the future imagined in Space Refugee are shaped by and respond to intersecting histories of modernity, coloniality, architectural development, extraterrestrial exploration, science fiction, and climate change.

A Contrastive Rhetorical Analysis of Hypocrisy in Christian and Islamic Moral Religious Contexts

Being hypocrite is to act in opposition to one's inner status. The goodness that he conveys is in contrast to the evilness that he has in his heart and intention. It is simply to be a double-faced human or a deceptive one. This study sheds light on hypocrisy as a vice. It investigates the Christian and Islamic tackle of such issue regarding its types, the rhetorical construction throughout the pragmatic strategies and the rhetorical devices that are applied. The results reveal that there is divergence between Christianity and Islam in the thematic and formal representation of hypocrisy in their moral religious contexts. Christian contexts adopts persuasion and instruction as pragmatic strategies whereas Islamic ones resort to persuasion and hinting. The results also show that the types of hypocrisy that are highlighted vary in their type and number of occurrence.

A Critique on Rhetorical Devices Used by Pakistani Politicians to Increase their Vote Bank A Critical Discourse Analysis of Urdu Newspapers' Headline

This research study has investigated how Pakistani politicians use rhetoric in their addresses during the election campaigns 2024 to persuade their voters. The sole purpose of this research is to discover the dimensions and power of Rhetorical devices used by Pakistani politicians for their personal objectives. It has explored how politicians grab the attention of the public by using rhetorical choices in their discourses. The best and most frequent uses of Rhetorical devices by politicians are antithesis, allusion repetition, hyperbole, metaphor amplification, alliteration, parallelism, symbolism, allegory, and imagery. The current research study employs the Power, Ideology, and Manipulation Identification (PIMI) model, a novel problem‐ oriented tool designed for the systematic examination of political discourse. This model integrates and adapts elements from two established analytical frameworks (Chilton & Schäffner, 1997; van Dijk, 2006) and is rooted in the theories and methodologies of Critical DiscoursemAnalysis (CDA).

Syntactic and Rhetorical Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inaugural Speech at Washington D.C.

Inaugural speech is the first chance for a president to engage the public in new strategies for success. Every inaugural speech is an example of the aims and objectives of the future. As president of America, Joe Biden has faced many challenges, including foreign affairs, a poor economy due to COVID-19, and, most importantly, American unity. The focus of the present investigation is to lead a stylistic examination from the viewpoint of syntax and rhetoric on Joe Biden's inaugural speech in Washington,D.C., on January 21, 2021. The researchers discovered that the speech is full of rhetorical and syntactic devices. The analysis revealed that the speech emphasized on unity and solidarity to preserve and promote American Identity through the excessive use of First-person pronouns and planned use of similes, repetitions, modality and conjunction. In this way, Biden made his speech productive and readily revealed his plans and motives to his audience.

Linguistic and Contextual Analysis of Fasting in Surah al-Baqarah: A Jewish-Christian Heritage in 7th Century Arabia

This research examines the Islamic obligation of fasting during the month of Ramadan as outlined in the Quran (Q 2:183-5). The author argues that many Islamic scholars have underestimated the importance and significance of this religious duty, instead focusing on the allowances and exemptions provided in the Quranic verses. Through a semantic analysis of the language and structure of Q 2:183-5, the paper contends that the Quran emphasizes fasting as a crucial act of worship that should not be taken lightly. The conditional sentence structure in the verses is interpreted as a rhetorical device to highlight the benefits of fasting, rather than merely providing relief or exceptions. Furthermore, the paper argues that the Quranic mandate for fasting was not novel, as it built upon pre-existing fasting traditions among earlier faith communities like Judaism, Christianity, and even ancient Greek and Buddhist practices. This suggests that the first recipients of the Quran would have understood fasting as a serious religious obligation. In conclusion, the research challenges the common scholarly view that the Quran provides extensive leniency regarding the Ramadan fast. Instead, it posits that the Quranic approach emphasizes the importance and wisdom behind this act of devotion, which Muslims should not underestimate or treat too lightly.

The language of Nigerian stand-up comedy

Nigeria is complexly multilingual. Arising from this, Nigerian stand–up comedians employ a variety of linguistic strategies to communicate with the audience. This research investigates the peculiarities of language use in Nigerian stand-up comedy by analysing patterns of code choices in the comic performances of four comedians. Because the stand-up comedy industry is predominant in the Southern part of Nigeria, the comedians chosen for this study are representative of the three geopolitical zones of southern Nigeria. The analysis of the data indicates that (1) although Nigerian stand-up comedians primarily use Nigerian Pidgin (NP) they also employ language alternation and code-switch between NP, English, and a variety of indigenous languages. (2) NP is mainly used in the oral medium. Consequently, features of orality: repetition, parallel structures, anaphora, lexical cushioning, semantic extension, metaphor imagery, sentence fragments, and rhetorical devices, are other dominant features of Nigerian stand-up comedy.

Metadiscursive nouns in corporate communication: A cross-cultural study of CEO letters in the US and Chinese corporate social responsibility reports

The study of rhetorical devices and how corporate leaders organise the texts and convey attitudes to stakeholders in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports has become an important research area in recent years. A relatively neglected means of rhetorical expressions, however, is metadiscursive nouns. This study investigates the use of metadiscursive nouns in a 0.5-million-word self-built corpus of the US and Chinese CEO letters in CSR reports to reveal cross-cultural variations. The results show that the interactive metadiscursive nouns are twice as frequent in the US discourse as in the Chinese discourse, demonstrating greater efforts invested in cohesion by the US companies. This difference can be attributed to the writer-responsible rhetoric in the West and the reader-responsible conventions in China. The interactional metadiscursive nouns in the US discourse occur twice as frequently as in the Chinese counterpart, suggesting greater exertion of nominal stance by the US companies. This discrepancy mainly arises from the high- and low-context variations between the US and China. This study sheds new insights on metadiscursive nouns as rhetorical resources in cross-cultural CSR communication and provides implications for ESP practitioners to use them as a means of conceptualising writer–reader interaction in corporate communication.

Study of conceptual metaphor in high school English Textbooks: A Case Study of People’s Education Edition

Since Lakoff and Johnson proposed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphor has gradually been studied as a way of thinking and acting rather than just a rhetorical device. In the past few decades, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has been applied to many fields, especially the field of Foreign Language Teaching. For second language learners, understanding metaphors in a different culture is one of the barriers in the process of second language learning. This paper makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the metaphors in the high school English textbooks. By enumerating three different metaphors in the textbook, it is not difficult to see that metaphor has caused obstacles to students' foreign language learning. At the same time, statistics on the frequency of metaphors in books can help us intuitively realize the universality of metaphor in language. Therefore, teachers should adjust their teaching strategies in time and have special teaching methods for learning material that contains metaphors.

“Here, We Investigate If There Is …”: A Functional Investigation of Self-Mentions in Research Article Abstracts

Abstract The present study explored authorial presence in the abstracts across three purpose-built discipline-specific corpora of RAs in major but relatively less represented disciplines in corpus studies: Civil Engineering (CE), Political Sciences (PS) and Veterinary Medicine (VM). In particular, due to less attention having been paid to these fields, we examined explicit authorial references with a functional perspective in a corpus of abstracts totaling over one million words. To this end, we first conducted a preliminary search for explicit third-person plural author references in the corpora and manually analysed a total of over 6,000 instances to check if they were all markers signaling an authorial presence in the text. Following this, the second manual analyses concentrated on categorizing the rhetorical functions of self-mentions based on Xia’s (2018) framework. The preliminary findings showed that the frequency of “we”-based authorial references in PS outweighed that in the other disciplines (PS: 722.13; CE: 636.81; VM: 481.30 per 100,000 words). Regarding the density of authorial references, we found that each discipline favored being more visible with divergent authorial roles in their abstracts. For example, PS were more rhetorically present in their abstracts by “proposing a theory or approach” whereas CE and VM authors used fewer self-mentions to mark their presence frequently with this rhetorical device. With respect to the functional analyses of the self-mentions of “we”, all three disciplines displayed more low-stakes functions such as “recount experimental procedure and methodology”. We focused on the significance of cross-disciplinary and functional analysis in the study in order to contribute to designing activities in EAP for each discipline.

Psycholinguistic Features in Advertising Discourse: Understanding the Cognitive Mechanisms behind Persuasion

Advertising discourse is a powerful tool employed by marketers to persuade consumers and drive purchasing behavior. Understanding the psycholinguistic features embedded within advertising messages is crucial for comprehending how these messages influence consumers' cognitive processes and decision-making. This article explores the intricate relationship between psycholinguistics and advertising discourse, shedding light on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin persuasion in marketing communications. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and marketing, we examine how linguistic elements such as language choice, rhetorical devices, and semantic priming impact consumers' perception, comprehension, and evaluation of advertisements. Additionally, we discuss the role of psychological principles such as cognitive fluency, persuasion techniques, and emotional appeals in shaping advertising discourse. By elucidating the interplay between language, cognition, and persuasion, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms driving consumer behavior in the context of advertising.

Media framing in Wirecard’s fraud scandal: Facts, failures, and spying fraudster fantasies

The aim of this paper is to investigate how fraud scandals are portrayed by the media. While accounting research predominantly explored the role of the media in fraud scandals in terms of their ‘watchdog’ function, how fraud scandals are portrayed by the media has been under-explored in the accounting literature. Drawing on Entman’s and Goffman’s seminal works on frames and framing, we examine the revelatory case of the Wirecard 2020 fraud scandal. Through an abductive analysis of 795 newspaper articles, we identify six frames that differ in selection and salience and that prevail in media coverage to varying degrees. Across these frames, our findings show that not only the selection of certain fraud aspects through bounding and contextualization becomes key, but also how selected aspects are made salient to readers by means of articulation through rhetoric and stylistic devices. Media frames that endure over time utilize rhetoric that is emotional, sensational, and judgmental to evoke feelings of outrage, shock, and fascination which are selectively connected to fraud victims, top managers as perpetrators, and the malpractice of auditing institutions. Our findings shed light on how the media can direct attention through specific frames with which they may steer and shape public opinion about the responsibilities of selected corporate and institutional stakeholders as well as related calls for reforms. Our research contributes to a social construction view of fraud scandals and draws further attention to the media’s ambiguous role as social-control agent.

Understanding Paul as an Antitype of Job: The Joban Allusion in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10

A careful reading of 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 reveals that the passage shares several motifs with the Book of Job: (1) a supernatural adversary, (2) physical suffering, (3) an otherworldly place, (4) social adversity, (5) affluence, and (6) boasting. In light of an audience-critical perspective, this article proposes that the language and imagery in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 contain a number of allusions that could direct its audience to juxtapose Paul with Job—a well-known righteous figure who demonstrated physical vulnerability but received public vindication from YHWH. According to this reading, the Joban allusion in the Corinthian passage functions as a rhetorical device that defends Paul’s apostolic authority against the super-apostles’ charge that his vulnerability evinces his lack of authority.

Emotions of fear and anger as a discursive tool of radical right leaders in Central Eastern Europe

The paper examines how the radical right parties´ leaders work with emotions while addressing their voters and sympathizers on Twitter/X social media. We focus on the “supply side” on the level of leaders´ discourses. The goal is to demonstrate how they work with emotions, especially those of fear and anger. The context represents Russian aggression against Ukraine, because, typically, circumstances of a crisis bolster the ability of radical right leaders to use emotional rhetoric devices. Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia represent three particularly relevant and distinctive cases among the CEE countries according to the relevance, relative strength, and stability of radical right parties. We examined social media, particularly Twitter, since it is one of the most prominent tools of political communication today, especially for populists. We collected the data of all Tweets between February 24, 2022 and February 24, 2023. We combined a systematic quantitative content analysis with a more in-depth qualitative analysis of the key characteristics of the discursive construction of the two most salient emotions: anger and fear. We did not confirm the assumption that they would utilise the war in Ukraine since most tweets addressed issues related to domestic politics. The research, however, confirmed that despite differences, anger and fear play a substantial role in the emotional repertoire and represent necessary rhetorical devices. Our findings concur with the literature on radical right populism and its employment of emotional discourse. We found that even a crisis in international politics has been reframed primarily as a domestic issue and integrated into classical discursive practices.

Verses of Impossibility in the Holy Quran: A Grammatical and Rhetorical Analysis

Verses of impossibility are those that refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use, things that are impossible to find or futile efforts. Impossibilities can be classified into logical, physical, causal, nomological, temporary, permanent, partial, total, objective or subjective impossibility. This study sought to analyze verses of impossibility in the Holy Quran, their grammatical structure, rhetorical features, types of questions and conditional, emphatic, and/or negative particles used. Results of the analysis showed two kinds of impossibility (i) those in which Allah challenges the disbelievers and those in which the disbelievers ask the Prophets for what they consider impossible demands. In addition, verses of impossibility in the current study use a combination of grammatical structures and rhetorical devices that mainly contain conditional sentences beginning with conditional particles أن /?an/ (if), لو ,حتى /Hatta:/ (until), لولا /laula:/ (if), negative, imperative, interrogative, and emphatic structures, few modals and rhetorical questions, some metaphors, hyperbole, antitheses and counterfactuals to describe challenges, futile efforts, stubbornness of the disbelievers and their incongruous behavior. They also focus on logical, temporary and permanent impossibilities. Other rhetorical features of the Holy Quran, such as antiphrasis, asyndeton, cadence, chiasmus, epizeuxis, equivoque, isocolon, palindrome, polyptoton, and synecdoche are still open for further investigation by future researchers.

A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF LITERARY CRITICISM A STUDY OF HOW LANGUAGE INFLUENCES THE EVALUATION OF LITERARY WORKS

This research delves into the complex connections between language and literary criticism, illuminating how linguistic decisions impact written work assessments. The study dives into different linguistic frameworks such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, and semantics to reveal the nuanced but potent ways language affects critical interpretations and assessments. This examination shows how rhetorical devices, diction, syntax, and metaphor play a part in crucial discourse by looking at literary critiques from various eras and genres. The study delves into how cultural and historical factors shape literary criticism's linguistic representation, illuminating the complex relationship between language and societal ideals. The subjective character of literary appraisal is better understood thanks to this in-depth linguistic research, which sheds light on how critics express their opinions. The results highlight the significance of language awareness in literary criticism by arguing for a more sophisticated and reflective method of assessing literary works.

The influence of private sector consultants on public management reforms: taking stock

IMPACT This article will help policy-makers and managers understand the roles private sector management consultants have played in public management reforms, what kinds of problems their involvement in public management reforms can entail and how to address these shortcomings. Although management consultants can provide useful expertise in planning and implementing public management reforms, their advice does not always consider public sector needs. Furthermore, the growing use of consultant services can hollow out public sector capacities. The authors highlight different rhetorical devices that consultants have used to increase their influence on public sector clients. Practitioners need to be aware of such techniques when making decisions about involving consultants in public management reforms. The authors also discuss how public managers can improve the commissioning of management consultants in order to address potential shortcomings and enhance the transfer of useful knowledge from consultants.