Rhetorical Features Research Articles

“For the People Act”: the partisan character of procedural arguments in US congressional rhetoric

Through the study of statements made for and against the 2019 “For the People” Act, this paper critically evaluates some emergent rhetorical features of contemporary legislative disagreement and debate. Specifically, I highlight the institutionalization of an argument scheme in which partisan claims are paired in ways that strain the connection between the procedures and substance of legislative deliberation. I argue that the institutionalization of this pattern becomes a self-sustaining system that simultaneously delimits the range of arguments by which public policy can be debated on the floor and further intensifies public perceptions of political polarization and gridlock. I evaluate the political significance of these findings in relation to the role of institutional rhetoric in deliberative democratic theory.

“These are my ‘selling points’”: Disciplinary variation in rhetorical features of graduate school statements of purpose

“These are my ‘selling points’”: Disciplinary variation in rhetorical features of graduate school statements of purpose

Fundamental issuesIn the book Al-Bustan in the parsing of the problems of the Qur’an by Ibn Al-Ahnaf Al-Yemeni (d. 717 AH)

Al-Bustan fi I'rab Mushkil al-Qur'an by Ibn Al-Ahnaf Al-Yemeni (d. 717 AH) is a seminal work in Qur'anic linguistics, offering an in-depth analysis of the grammatical and syntactical complexities of the Qur'an. The author meticulously addresses ambiguous structures, polysemous words, and variations in canonical readings (qira’at), providing linguistic and theological insights that harmonize with the Qur'an's eloquence and unity. By employing the principles of Arabic grammar (nahw), morphology (sarf), and contextual analysis, Ibn Al-Ahnaf resolves apparent contradictions and clarifies rhetorical features, showcasing the linguistic sophistication of the Qur'an. The book bridges the gap between language and theology, demonstrating how grammatical parsing (i'rab) enhances the understanding of Qur'anic meanings while safeguarding doctrinal integrity. Designed as a resource for scholars and students alike, Al-Bustan remains a pivotal reference in Qur'anic exegesis and Arabic grammar, reflecting its enduring significance in Islamic scholarship.

Landscape Sketches in Memoir Prose of 20th Century Russian Monasticism

This study explores the role of landscape sketches in the memoir prose of 20th-century Russian monasticism, focusing on the spiritual recollections of Archbishop Nikon (Rozhdestvensky). It identifies the distinctive ideological and thematic content, imagery organization, stylistic features, and intentionality behind these landscape portrayals within monastic literary works. The analysis reveals that the primary themes conveyed through these sketches center around love for God and one’s neighbors, the action of Divine Providence, and faith in God. Key motifs include nature, beauty, childhood, joy, and happiness, with significant imagery associated with churches, monasteries, and monastic lands. The study posits that the main intention of these landscape sketches is self-reflective, manifesting in two primary vectors: (1) contemplation on the relationship between nature, its states, and human emotions; (2) reflections on the Divine essence present in nature. Furthermore, it examines the rhetorical features of landscape sketches in these memoirs, highlighting the use of religious terminology (specifically Orthodox lexicon with spiritual and moral connotations), epithets, metaphors, enumerations, and names of weather phenomena and flora. The findings conclude that the significant functions of religious landscape sketches are both meaning-making and representational.

Remnants of Eternal Possibility

This article presents a new way of considering the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) by arguing that Iqbal's lyric poetry, particularly the ghazal, should be read as a mode of expression that sets out its own methodology for negotiating the new demands colonial modernity made of the Muslim subject's relationship to tradition. Through a close reading and analysis of a Persian ghazal from Iqbal's 1923 Payām-i Mashriq (Message of/from the East), this article proposes that Iqbal's ghazals offer a lyric method in which the resources of the Persianate poetic tradition navigate these demands on the self and its representation. With an analysis of formal and rhetorical features, mainly apostrophe and the imperative voice, as well as a consideration of Iqbal's philosophy of time and the representation of temporality in the lyric, one can see how the poem reorients the connection between tradition and modernity not as historical trajectory, but as co-constituted in lyric time in an ambivalent, mutually generative relationship.

أساليب الملأ في مواجهة دعوة الأنبياء في القرآن الكريم: دراسة دلالية بيانية

The study aimed to explain the methods and role of elites in confronting Prophets’ calls in the Holy Quran, as well as the rhetorical connotations they contained. It also aimed to identify and address these methods, and to clarify the extent of their influence on the call. The researcher employed the inductive method to track these methods, and the deductive method to infer the meanings inherent in the word's use, the Quranic structure, the Prophets’ story, and the rhetorical features. The study elucidated the strategies employed by Elites in response to the call, illustrating them through the biographies and stories of prophets. This provided preachers with a framework to follow and emulate, guiding them in addressing the call’s consequences and responsibilities, and in promoting positive values within societies that steer clear of despair and hopelessness. The study concluded with a series of significant findings, the most significant of which was that the Holy Qur'an contains a variety of elite methods, including the use of vocabulary and structures. These methods demonstrate the extent of elite influence in achieving a surface aversion to the call and its failure to achieve its true goal, as well as the wisdom of the prophets in rejecting these methods in order to uphold the laws of the struggle between good and evil.

A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of socio-cultural values in Chinese and English social stories for autistic individuals

Social Stories are utilised to educate autistic individuals about appropriate social behaviours and politeness in social contexts. Based on the Theory of Mind (ToM), Social Stories are associated with neurotypicality which suggests human brains function in a similar way. Employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the study examines and compares the cultural differences between Chinese Social Stories (CSS) and English Social Stories (ESS) through analysing keywords, frequency of lexical items and collocation of the first-person pronoun. The results reveal that CSS emphasise the Confucian values of politeness, filial piety and hierarchical human relationship, while ESS recognise individual preferences, emotions and the value of fairness. The results enrich the knowledge of the discoursal and rhetorical features of Social Stories in different languages and provide theoretical implications for understanding the concepts of normality, politeness and neurotypicality. This article concludes by arguing that society should adopt the neurodiversity approach towards autistic individuals.

A Study on English-Vietnamese Translation of Advertising Slogans From the Perspective of Newmark’s Translation Methods

This study aims to investigate the translation of advertising slogans from English to Vietnamese from the perspective of eight translation methods proposed by Newmark (1988). To realize this objective, the study uses two research methods of discourse analysis and translation comparative. The former is employed to analyse the linguistic components used in the original text and the translated one while the latter is used to identify the similarities and differences between the two texts so as to identify what translation method is used in a particular slogan translation. 60 pairs of English and Vietnamese advertising slogans collected randomly from different means of media for different kinds of products are used as the research sample. The research findings illustrate that of the eight methods proposed by Newmark, four are found in the translation of advertising slogans from English to Vietnamese, including Faithful translation, Semantic translation, Communicative translation and Free translation. Among these methods, Free translation is the most commonly-used, followed by Communicative translation, then Faithful translation and Semantic translation. The choice of a particular method for a slogan translation depends on the linguistic characteristics of the original slogan, including its lexical features, sentence structure, social and psychological features and rhetorical features. These findings partly go in line with earlier studies by Newmark and other scholars while some new findings are identified as the new contributions of this study to the research topic.

THE ROLE OF STYLISTIC DEVICES IN SHAPING POLITICAL DISCOURSE AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Researchers have always noted that there are stylistic features of political texts that would always see them as being effective tools in appealing and manipulating the audience.stic features. All these texts use tropes such as metaphor, reinforcement, parallelism, and appeal to emotion to convey messages with certain communication purposes. Such devices help politicians to work with emotions, to explain some ideas and to link themselves and their opinions with the society, so their information is considered and effective. When focusing on the stylistic and rhetorical features of political speeches we learn more about how language can be used to influence, mobilize and construct the world out there. In this article the necessity and function of such techniques in political discourse will be explained and illustrated.

Examining teacher-written conference abstracts: Rhetorical functions and syntactic complexity features

This study explored the characteristics of accepted conference abstracts (CAs) written by language teachers for a large-scale national conference on English Language Teaching (Best Practices in Language Education Conference; BEST) compared to those produced by researchers or teacher-researchers for the teaching-oriented strands of a large-scale international conference on Applied Linguistics (American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference; AAAL). The comparative analysis focused on three rhetorical features of the abstracts (move-step realization, embeddedness, and sequence) and move-specific syntactic complexity features. Adopting the CA move/step framework of Yoon and Casal (2020a), we examined rhetorical functions and syntactic features in 60 abstracts from each conference: all BEST abstracts and the abstracts accepted to the two pedagogy-oriented strands of the AAAL conference. Our findings generally indicate prominent differences between BEST and AAAL writers in their use of moves, steps, and embedded steps. They also show differences between the two groups in terms of the use of some syntactic measures, such as the length of sentences and the use of complex nominals. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of the CA genre and provide insight into language teachers’ research literacy with a focus on CA writing, which may be useful for the development of evidence-based CA writing guidelines for teachers.

Judicial self fashioning: Rhetorical performance in Supreme Court opinions

Justices on the United States Supreme Court use rhetorical strategies to maintain institutional legitimacy. In the court opinion, a strategy called the monologic voice presents a flattering depiction of the Court. The monologic voice occurs through two tones, the individualistic and collective, which respectively maintain the Justices’ legitimacy through critique and the Court’s legitimacy through unification. We train large language models to identify these rhetorical features in 15,291 modern Supreme Court opinions, issued between 1946 and 2022. While the fraction of collective and individualistic tones has been relatively consistent between 1946 and 2022, the Rehnquist Court used the collective tone at a higher rate than any other Court. In recent terms, 2021 and 2022, we find suggestions of another rhetorical shift, as all Associate Justices of the Roberts Court, excluding Chief Justice Roberts, used the individualistic tone at a historically high rate.

The news and structural style in the poem of Ibn Zurayq Al-Baghdadi (La Taathleh)

This research deals with the two styles of news and composition in Ibn Zuraiq Al-Baghdadi’s poem (Do not torture him); These two styles are the pillars of Arabic speech and the basis of its discourse, and each of them has linguistic, grammatical, stylistic, and rhetorical characteristics that distinguish it from the other. In this research, we will discuss the definition of the two styles in language and terminology, and provide a brief overview of the poet mentioned in our research. Then we will move on to mention the declarative places, as well as the constructional ones, and how Ibn Zuraiq al-Baghdadi used them in each place, and the reasons for his use of each style. And exploring the aesthetics of all of the above to conclude a set of results in which we mention the aesthetics of each style in poetic discourse, and the extent of this poet’s ability to employ methods to attract the recipient’s attention towards what he presented. The aim of the study is to highlight the stylistic and rhetorical features of the two styles as well, and to work on analyzing the aforementioned verses, including predicates or constructions. It should be noted that there are verses that contain both styles, so we will analyze the style in which we see the appropriate or strongest significance, even though we have analyzed the two styles in a way that we hope to It will be enough. After that comes the list of sources and references that we have adopted in this research. They are diverse sources and references, including traditional, rhetorical, grammatical, and contextual sources, as well as the books of hadith scholars due to their importance in rhetorical and contextual studies.

Comparing Rhetoric in Antiquity: The Greek and Indian Cases in Perspective

Abstract The understanding of rhetoric has been heavily influenced by the Western tradition, particularly the Greco-Latin tradition. Rhetoric was traditionally considered a creation of the Greeks and a unique feature of the West. However, theoretical perspectives such as Axial Age, Comparative History, Global History, and Comparative World Rhetoric offer new insights into the relationship between communication and persuasion. This paper aims to compare certain characteristics of Greek rhetoric and Indian rhetoric using the perspective of Comparative World Rhetoric. To do this, I analysed the Vedic texts, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the Nyāya Sūtra. I concluded that the comparison was a fundamental aspect of the rhetorical exercise in antiquity, as it allowed the speaker to better connect with the audience.

Exploring the Interpersonal Functions of Negation in Science Writing Across 35 Years

Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.

Misleading information in crises: exploring content-specific indicators on Twitter from a user perspective

ABSTRACT Recent crises like the COVID-19 pandemic provoked an increasing appearance of misleading information, emphasising the need for effective user-centered countermeasures as an important field in HCI research. This work investigates how content-specific user-centered indicators can contribute to an informed approach to misleading information. In a threefold study, we conducted an in-depth content analysis of 2382 German tweets on Twitter (now X) to identify topical (e.g. 5G), formal (e.g. links), and rhetorical (e.g. sarcasm) characteristics through manual coding, followed by a qualitative online survey to evaluate which indicators users already use autonomously to assess a tweet's credibility. Subsequently, in a think-aloud study participants qualitatively evaluated the identified indicators in terms of perceived comprehensibility and usefulness. While a number of indicators were found to be particularly comprehensible and useful (e.g. claim for absolute truth and rhetorical questions), our findings reveal limitations of indicator-based interventions, particularly for people with entrenched conspiracy theory views. We derive four implications for digitally supporting users in dealing with misleading information, especially during crises.

‘Endless circumlocutions’: Speaking To and Away from the Point Before and After Melmoth the Wanderer

Circumlocution has been an important stylistic feature of the Gothic novel since its inception in the eighteenth century. Might this rhetorical feature be thought of in national or even geopolitical terms? Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe in the eighteenth century had linked circumlocution to a Shakespearean blending of comedy and tragedy that marked a distinctively British artistic sensibility against the constraints of French neo-classicism. However, Maturin’s use of the trope in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought in new national and transnational inflections linked to the central character’s own ability to circle around the world and the presence of colonised others within the text. This article asks whether circumlocution after Maturin’s novel becomes an end in itself, a walking around the borders of speech and meaning that would appeal to later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire.

Towards the Communicative Specifics and Rhetoric Features of the Media Model of Political Discourse of the Acting Leader of the French Right — Wing Political Party «Rassemblement National» Jordan Bardella

Towards the Communicative Specifics and Rhetoric Features of the Media Model of Political Discourse of the Acting Leader of the French Right — Wing Political Party «Rassemblement National» Jordan Bardella

Comparative analysis of interactional metadiscursive resources in academic writing by L2 and L1 English writers

Interactional Metadicursive Resources (IMRs) are established as the most common rhetorical features that assist writers in achieving interaction with the discourse community. The purpose of this study was to compare the use of IMRs in research articles (RAs) authored by Yemeni L2 writers and L1 English writers, while also examining the extent to which both groups employ these resources to achieve persuasive purposes. Based on Hyland’s (2019) model, AntConc was used as an analytical tool in a corpus-based methodology to analyze the use of IMRs in their context of use, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Moreover, Swales’ models were adapted to identify rhetorical moves in the different sections of RAs. The findings indicate that L1 writers tended to use IMRs more frequently and effectively to pursue ethos and pathos. However, Yemeni L2 writers tended to use IMRs sparingly, lacking familiarity with their persuasive role. L1 writers tended to express epistemic and affective stances and used these resources throughout their research, while Yemeni L2 writers tended to focus more on propositional content, using limited IMRs in their writing. Furthermore, unlike L1 English writers, who tended to negotiate their claims in the RA introduction and engage their audience in the RA conclusion, Yemeni L2 writers almost exclusively strengthened their line of argument when initiating and concluding their research. The study concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of the effective use of IMRs in L2 academic writing.

Marcha das Vadias: performing disidentification in transnational protests

Abstract In 2011, protests against rape culture ignited across the globe. Inspired by SlutWalk Toronto (SWT), organizers planned protests that adapted the rhetorical features of SlutWalk to their local contexts. This article examines the visual rhetoric of Marcha das Vadias (MDV), a series of satellite protests in Brazil. I argue that protestors enacted disidentification as a response to the constitutive rhetoric of SlutWalk, bringing into focus how ideologies of race, class, and religion interact with norms of sex and gender to reinforce rape logic. The translation of “slut” to “vadias” centered the linguistic and cultural contexts of contemporary Brazil while maintaining solidarity with the broader SlutWalk movement. Protestors deploy seven rhetorical personae that resituate the constitutive narrative of the movement. Altogether, their performances of personae enact a rhetoric of survivance, which utilizes collectivity, structural critique, non-linear temporality, and storytelling to resist systems of oppression.

Gbari Personal Names: A Communicative Act and Rhetorical Features Analysis

Gbari Personal Names: A Communicative Act and Rhetorical Features Analysis