Rhetorical Question Research Articles

The evolution of the author—authorship and speculative worldbuilding in Johannes Heldén’s Evolution

ABSTRACT This article analyses the digital work Evolution, designed to generate poetry mimicking its creator, Johannes Heldén. Created together with programmer Håkan Jonson, Evolution is, according to its abstract, made to replace the human author Heldén, making him redundant. The aim of this article is to examine how Evolution problematises the role of the author and the creative process in a current and future technological landscape. While previous research has focused primarily on medial and technical aspects of the work, this article employs an analysis of the conceptual aspects and focuses on the role of Evolution’s abstract in relation to the generative poetry and how the work navigates the dichotomies analogue/digital, as well as text/paratext. Through the lens of narratology, the article argues that Evolution engages in speculative worldbuilding, especially through the introduction of thought experiments in the abstract. Consequently, Evolution becomes a work of science fiction, posing rhetorical questions that impel the reader to think about the role of artificial intelligence in creativity.

Translating 1 Corinthians 12.31a as a Rhetorical Question

Understanding ζηλοῦτε in the indicative mood, this paper proposes the following translation of 1 Cor 12.31a: “Yet, are you continuously striving for the ‘greater’ spiritual gifts?” Considering the flow of Paul’s arguments, the indicative reading of ζηλοῦτε should be preferred to the imperative reading that is predominantly found in Bible translations and scholarly discussions. Furthermore, translating this indicative ζηλοῦτε interrogatively (i.e., as Paul asking a rhetorical question)—rather than as a simple statement—can help Bible readers better recognize the rhetorical force of the passage. This paper defends this indicative-interrogative translation by challenging four common objections to the indicative reading of 1 Cor 12.31a.

Who's Searching for the Soul of Black Preaching? History Proves It's Never Been Lost

The 2023 Black Theology and Leadership Initiative convened around the theme, “Searching for the Soul of Black Preaching.” Rather than focusing on the performative aspects of Black preaching, as an art form, the convening looked substantively at the soul of Black preaching, that is, its very essence. What does it mean to provide hope to a people who have historically been marginalized, as part of the Black experience in America? In relying on some of America's most respected scholars, as well as some of my own previously published works, I argue that the soul of Black preaching includes four fundamental elements. First, with the centrality of Scripture, Black preaching is based on a fundamental belief that God's providence meets the Black lived experience. Second, as a natural extension of the first element, I argue there is a biblical hermeneutic that sees Scripture as “biased,” because God is not neutral. Instead, God is on the side of the oppressed. Third, in recognizing that the Black preacher's work is incomplete without divine intervention, I discuss the transcendence of the Holy Spirit for “participant proclamation” as part of the Black worship experience. Finally, in looking at the social justice nature of Black preaching, in speaking to a marginalized class, I argue that in addition to focusing on piety, Black preaching is often prophetic and/or political. In answering the rhetorical question of who is searching for the “soul” of Black preaching, I therefore argue that based on the four elements listed above, and the way Black preaching has been a rallying call for the Black community from the period of enslavement onward, the soul of Black preaching has never been lost.

Stylistic peculiarities of Edgar Poe’s and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s gothic novellas

The article deals with the comparative analysis of stylistic features of selected short stories (novellas) by the American writers Edgar Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Using a set of methods (theoretical analysis, holistic text analysis, stylistic analysis), relying on the creative manifestos of the two authors, as well as on the results of stylistic analysis of the corpus of short stories, the authors of the article trace the continuity and distinctive features in the work of the two writers. The obtained results allow to state the presence of similar features in the short stories of Edgar Poe and Howard Lovecraft, such as gothic chronotope, mystical and fantastic elements, common type of narrator, characterised by a borderline state, and deliberate fear-mongering. At the same time, however, the texts of both authors demonstrate specific features. Poe’s Gothic novellas are characterised by increased psychologism, which manifests itself in the prevalence of such stylistic devices as repetition, gradation, aposiopeisis, rhetorical question and exclamation, which eloquently testify to the “inner horrorˮ of the characters. The high allusiveness of Poe’s short stories testifies to the close connection of the described events with reality. The prevailing stylistic devices of Lovecraft’s novellas (epithets, personifications) testify to the author’s attempt to breathe life into inanimate objects, to extract them from non-existence, and to make the reader experience a “cosmicˮ horror of the unknown and external. The author’s complicated syntax combined with irrational enumerative rows suggests that Lovecraft’s work might be influenced by modernist aesthetics.

Discursive Representation of Cyber Scam in Selected Nigerian Hip Hop Songs

This study examines the representation of cyber scam in Nigerian hip hop songs. Forty-five singles of twelve Nigerian hip hop artistes constituted the study population. Purposively selected cyber scam-related lyrics of seven artistes constitute the study population. Relevant aspects of Scollon’s »Mediated Discourse Analysis Theory« (MDAT) were used to engage the data. The Nigerian government, scammers, victims and religious clerics were identified as participants in cyber scam discourse. With re-course to context, Nigerian hip hop artistes articulate specific discourse acts such as glamorisation of cyber scam, assertion of identity, appeal to scammers’ cognitive abilities and justification of cyber scam. These acts are discursively projected through metaphorical expressions, repetition, pronominal references, lexical choices and rhetorical questions. This study has contributed to scholarship on cyber fraud by identifying and describing how context functions in articulating the roles, attitudes and orientations of social actors involved in cyber scam.

Question Typology in Kenyan TV Argumentative Talk Shows

The argumentative talk on radio and TV has become a popular feature of media discourse in Kenya. Question-answer sequences as the talk unfolds through the joint participation of co-participants in the talk have emerged as a means to put argumentative talk into effect. Yet, the nature of questions and their categorization remain little understood. Given the recursive nature of question-answer sequences, this paper investigates question typology that sets apart argumentative talk shows from other types of talk. The data consists of transcripts from two Kenyan TV argumentative talk shows: Checkpoint on KTN and Opinion Court on Citizen TV. A question classification scheme by Schirm [2008] was used to discuss the incidence and usage of questions in argumentative talk shows. Findings revealed that clashing, rhetorical, classic clarifying, and opinion-eliciting questions were the most frequently used types in the data sets. It was also noted that different question types served unique rhetorical purposes leading to the conclusion that argumentative talk shows on TV exhibit recursive interactional resources qualifying it as a genre.

HUMOR IN DEDDY’S CORBUZIER “SOMASI”

The purpose of this study was to find out the forms of humor in a stand-up comedy video titled "Somasi". It used the humor theory proposed by Martin to support this analysis. This study used the descriptive-qualitative method. The results of this study showed that the comics' utterances contain several forms of humor. These types include jokes, spontaneous conversational humor consisting of sarcasm, satire, overstatement and understatement, self-deprecation, ridicule, answers to rhetorical questions, and clever answers to serious statements.

‘Where have you been hiding this voice?’

Abstract This study explores compliments given by judges to contestants on the TV talent show Arab Idol. A total of 120 comments from the third season 2014–2015 were analyzed for compliment types, structures, lexicon, and supportive remarks. Spenser-Oatey’s (2000, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2008) rapport management theory was employed to determine how judges managed rapport with contestants through compliments. The analysis shows that the majority of judges’ compliments on the show were explicit compliments that were based on three syntactic patterns and four types of positive semantic carriers conveying complimenting adjectives, verbs, nouns, and adverbs. A smaller category of implicit compliments involved such strategies as comparison/contrast, rhetorical questions, and praising contestant’s country. Both categories were typically qualified by supportive or weakening elements such as repetition, encouragement, and criticism, resulting in a third category of ‘macro-compliments’. The study shows that rapport management accounts to a large extent for the judges’ complimenting behavior.

PENGGUNAAN GAYA BAHASA DALAM PUISI KARYA SISWA KELAS VIII SMP NEGERI 27 MALANG

Poetry is one of the standards for junior high school (SMP) students' literary abilities. In poetry, there is definitely a language style that functions to beautify the language in poetry. Likewise with poems written by class VIII A students at SMPN 27 Malang. Based on this, the aim of this research is to reveal the use of language styles in students' poetry, so that the types and forms of use of language styles are known and students' abilities in applying diction in poetry. The research used is qualitative. The data sources contained in this research are 34 poems written by students. From the results of the analysis, it was found that sixteen (16) types of language styles were obtained, with a total of 79. The language styles found include: the first is rhetorical reticence with the highest number of occurrences of around 22 data, then followed by the metaphor, hyperbole and personification language styles with 9 data, followed by the anaphora language style with 6 data. There are other language styles such as rhetorical questions and associations with 4 data each, followed by synecdoche pars pro toto and repetition with 3 data. Next there are the language styles of allegory, tautology, synecdoche totem pro parte which both amount to 2 data, then there are also the language styles of epic parable, simile, pleonasm, and alliteration which each have 1 data. The forms of language style units obtained from students' poetry are in the form of word units, sound units and sentence units. Finally, students' ability to apply denotative and connotative meaningful diction in poetry.

Biscuit Slogan in Commercial Media: An Analytical Exploration of Figurative Language

This study examines the use of figurative language in biscuit slogans in commercial media, focusing on advertisements from 2015 to 2020. The research aims to explore the linguistic functions of figurative language in advertising and its impact on consumer perception and behavior. A descriptive qualitative research approach is employed, with data collected from fifteen biscuit slogans featured on social media platforms, particularly YouTube. The analysis reveals a variety of figurative language types used in these slogans, including metaphors, symbols, rhetorical questions, assonance, alliteration, repetition, hyperbole, and personification. The findings suggest that figurative language is a powerful tool in advertising, influencing consumer perceptions and brand engagement. The study highlights the importance of cultural elements in slogan creation and the effectiveness of figurative language in making slogans memorable and persuasive. Future research should focus on empirically measuring the impact of figurative language in advertising across different cultural contexts to optimize advertising strategies and enhance brand communication.

Textual Consistency and Harmony in the Poetry of Dr. Adel bin Khamees Al-Zahrani (Between Tradition and Renewal)

The theory of Text Linguistics is one of the most important modern theories associated with linguistic heritage. It bears significant benefits as it starts where traditional grammar ends. The traditional approach used to consider the sentence as the basic unit. However, Text Linguistics moves beyond this by recognizing a larger semantic unit, one that encompasses context and related meanings (both before and after), taking into account the circumstances of the receiver. This approach results in a methodology leading to a complete understanding of texts in terms of reference and intent. Nonetheless, it doesn't deviate from traditional grammar. The grammatical heritage and the concepts and rules it contains are the actual foundation for textual trends and a source for many of its ideas and concepts. This study has achieved crucial textual criteria: consistency and cohesion in its various forms and elements, which are built upon it. The poetic texts in this collection have demonstrated that textual consistency and cohesion, according to Text Linguistics theory, have no bounds. The linguistic depth it possesses does not surrender to the limits of modern theory. It has managed to introduce forms beyond its bounds. Some of these include rhetorical questions, imperative style, and various verb forms referring to the future. Additionally, the study has shown that Arabic grammar has defined the distant reference in the demonstrative pronoun. However, this reference remains challenging for text linguists to specify. The study recommends further research into narrative discourse in the collection since it contains a scholarly material that can complement the series of this study.

Linguistic Features and Structures in Newspaper Headlines of the ‘The Standard’ and ‘Daily Nation’ on Banditry, Kenya, 2023

This article aims to look into the linguistic features and structures used in The Standard and Daily Nation Newspaper Headlines on the subject, banditry and the possible implication that it has to the shaping of public perception, informing government responses and raising awareness about the challenges posed by banditry. The study adopted systemic functional linguistics framework, introduced by Michael Halliday in the 1960s. It also adopted analytical research design. Data collection involved the development of a coding sheet. A coding sheet was developed to guide the systematic categorization and analysis of linguistic features and structures present in the newspaper headlines. Content analysis was employed to examine the functions, themes and the rhetorical devices used in the headlines to portray banditry incidents. The data analysis procedure entailed a systematic analysis of the newspaper headlines, aiming to examine the ways they reflect the realities on reporting of banditry in the study regions. The findings revealed that there is a nuanced interplay of linguistic features that significantly shape the construction of public perception. The headlines employed vivid verbs, descriptive adjectives, and metaphors to convey the actions, attributes, and causes associated with banditry. Rhetorical questions, emotive language, personalization, and attributions to sources engaged readers emotionally and conveyed the stance of news sources. The recommendations from this study suggests that newspapers should use varied linguistic elements to offer readers with a more comprehensive knowledge of banditry, editors and journalists should also be creative and precise in their terminologies, use language appropriately when reporting difficult themes and the media should employ rhetorical questions and emotive language with caution. There should be a balance to ensure that emotions do not overpower accurate reporting.

New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims

Beydoun, K. A. (2023). The new crusades: Islamophobia and the global war on Muslims.University of California Press. "How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?” wonders a voice in Wizard of the Crow, a novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006, p. 681). One answer to this rhetorical question is addressed by the Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said’s (2003) statement: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate” (as cited in Beydoun, 2023, p. 68). Much of the colonial telling happens in the realm of education, whose institutionalized tools of textbooks and policies have been responsible for reproducing the fake history of the imperial narrative, one that silences the oppressed and lets the oppressors shine with nobility. Said’s statement not only answers the above question but also points to the empire’s hegemonic aspirations of constituting the identity of the Other since the Other in colonial discourse is framed as the uneducated who needs to be educated, necessarily, in the logics of the empire. Instilling racism as a major colonial project against the Muslim Other has been the case with the United States of America’s foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, a renewed imperialism in the name of fighting “terror.” Therefore, educating the U.S. Muslim youths about themselves as being anti-Western barbaric terrorists is as colonially imperative as educating white American generations about the latter being defenders of White “democratic” civilization against the “barbarity” of the former. Challenging the dominant stories of the empire demands devising tools that shake the grand narrative from within by making the missing narratives visible and heard

‘Thanks for being here with us’: Para-social interaction and the effects of pundit talk on the Hannity and Maddow shows

Contemporary American television news centers pundits as key voices in national political discourse. The most prominent pundits anchor their own programs, often during primetime hours, reaching large audiences . This paper analyzes pundits’ performance of a type of news talk that is designed to appear unscripted and therefore authentic, enhancing parasocial interaction (PSI) with viewers and affirming pundits’ roles as experts. Data collected from two of the most-watched pundit-helmed news shows— Hannity and The Rachel Maddow Show—suggests that pundits use greeting tokens, personal pronouns, repetition, and rhetorical questions during their opening monologues. We discuss the mechanisms through which punditry may contribute to political polarization by creating emphasis frames.

The acquisition of rhetorical questions in bilingual children with Italian as a heritage language

Abstract Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are a complex phenomenon at the interface of pragmatics, prosody and syntax, which requires reasoning on intentions and goals, and which involves a mismatch between literal and intended meaning. In Italian, RhQs can be marked by optional particles and verbal morphology. We investigated when children aged 6-9 acquire the relevant patterns of optional modification and exploit them in the appropriate pragmatic context. In an elicited production study with 84 monolingual and 88 Italian–German bilingual children, we found that development in monolinguals was determined by age with a progression between 6 and 9 years, while bilingual development was influenced by proficiency in the heritage language and dominance more generally. These results are in line with Tsimpli's (2014) proposal that “very-late-acquired phenomena”, especially interface domains, depend on their timing in acquisition. Unlike for other pragmatic phenomena, such as irony and conversational competence, there was no evidence for a bilingual advantage.

The Ottoman Legacy of the Connected Histories of Demographic Engineering: The Case of the Ottoman Greeks of Western Anatolia

ABSTRACT Is there any relationship between the seemingly separate histories of demographic engineering that affected millions of Ottoman peoples of Albanian, Arab, Bulgarian, Circassian, Georgian, Greek, Jewish or Kurdish origin and the Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Russian territories during the late-Ottoman period? Does this historical legacy play a role in the nation-state building processes of the Republic of Turkey and other post-Ottoman nation-states? What may sound like simple and rhetorical questions, taken at their face value, provide a scholarly framework for a more connected and holistic history of demographic engineering. Focusing on the personal micro-histories of the victims and perpetrators of demographic engineering clearly demonstrates how such histories are entangled with each other, and their role in the creation of the post-Ottoman world. The article argues that, unique as it may seem, a segment in the life of a Unionist-appointed and Muslim nationalist Ottoman civil servant; Ferid Bey, who was both a victim and a culprit of ethnic violence, points out to a pattern that connects histories of demographic engineering designed primarily by competing nationalists in the late Ottoman Empire. It underlines the impact of this legacy on the nation-state building processes of the post-Ottoman world.

Evasiveness in Greek Political Interviews: A Case Study in Conversation Analysis

This paper identifies the conversational practices of evasiveness in Greek political interviews and debates through Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. The present study is accomplished according to Clayman and Heritage's proposed model of questioning and answering dimensions in American and British news interviews. The analysis focuses on the sequential organisation of the pre-allocation type of interviews exploring how interviewers structure their questions while focusing on the practices that interviewees deploy to display resistance towards the addressed questions. By presenting transcripts from three interviews and two political debates, it is argued that Greek IEs show resistance in answering by providing partial or incomplete responses or by performing a different action than the addressed through specific turn prefaces, i.e., look-, listen-, first of all- turn beginning components and the practices of rhetorical questions and the incorporation of IR’s wording. According to findings, similar practices of resistance can be found in both cross-cultural contexts with some differentiations and novel elements in the Greek corpus as well as Greek IRs’ multi-unit style of questioning which seems to favour politicians’ evasiveness.

Argumentation Strategies in Courtroom Discourse

This paper tries to explore the different argumentation strategies in courtroom discourse. The paper aims to decode the various argumentative strategies that are employed to communicate a successful interaction between the interlocutors in courtrooms. This is done by highlighting the linguistic tools targeting the persuasion of the conversationalists in the legal discourse presented in courts. The paper will focus on five strategies of argumentation, including lexical choices, questioning and answering, oppositional arguments, rhetorical questions, and premeditated arguments. The core concern of the investigation of these argumentation strategies is to show the degree to which they are used by courtroom interlocutors to communicate a successful and persuasive argument to their recipients. Data used in this study are derived from two legal trials: Nelson Mandela’s trial and Bill Clinton’s trial. The research questions of this paper are: first, what is meant by argumentation in courtroom discourse? Second, what are the different argumentation strategies used in courtroom discourse? Third, to what extent are argumentation strategies employed to achieve a persuasive argument between interlocutors in courtrooms? There are three main findings in this paper: First, attorneys and litigants use various argumentation strategies to influence their recipients so as to be able to persuade the court of their arguments. Second, the power of persuasiveness is entirely based on the ability to use various strategies of argumentation. Third, language is a crucial element in the understanding of legal arguments in courtrooms.

Deep Learning: Institutions of Beauty in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction

Why does one begin an academic paper with a rhetorical question? It is a technique I have noticed in the papers of first-year students, often used in an attempt to denote authority. The technique performs confidence, yet its lack of commitment renders its tone uncertain and amateurish. The piece can feel more like a brainstorm than a finished product, and instead of reading like a question the writer is asking us, it reads like they are questioning themselves. The thought process is something to be hidden in the humanities; rarely in an English essay prompt does the phrase ‘show your working’ appear. Instead, we perform the illusion that the work appeared out of thin air, that the thought process and the finished product are one and the same. While we know that this is not the reality of writing, we perform it nonetheless because in literary criticism the grade of an essay reflects the end product regardless of the process. The question that opens this essay, of course, has an answer: we demand that amateurs perform the end result of professional training, but students then imitate what they believe academic professionalism should sound like. But if and when students realise that they will be rewarded for merely generating a finished product, then how does the university dissuade them from simply doing so—bypassing the process for the product—when it results in academic, and economic, validation? When AI can reliably produce professional sounding papers better than an amateur writer can, then the currency of knowledge, if knowledge is in fact a currency, will become completely decentralised.

How do validity experts conceptualise argumentation? It's a rhetorical question.

Health professions education (HPE) has adopted the conceptualization of validity as an argument. However, the theoretical and practical aspects of how validity arguments should be developed, used and evaluated in HPE have not been deeply explored. Articulating the argumentation theory undergirding validity and validation can help HPE better operationalise validity as an argument. To better understand this, the authors explored how HPE validity scholars conceptualise assessment validity arguments and argumentation, seeking to understand potential consequences of these views on validation practices. The authors used critical case sampling to identify HPE assessment validity experts in three ways: (1) participation in a prominent validity research group, (2) appearing in a bibliometric study of HPE validity publications and (3) authorship of recent HPE validity literature. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 experts in HPE assessment validity from four different countries. The authors used reflexive thematic analysis to develop themes relevant to their research question. The authors developed three themes grounded in participants' responses: (1) In theory, HPE validity is a social and situated argument. (2) In practice, the absence of audience and evaluation stymies the social nature of HPE validity. (3) Lack of validity argumentation creates and maintains power differentials within HPE. Participants articulated that current HPE validation practices are rooted in post-positivist epistemology when they should be situated (i.e. context-dependent), audience-centric and inclusive. When discussing validity argumentation in theory, participants' descriptions reflect an interpretivist lens for evaluation that is misaligned with real-world validity practices. This misalignment likely arises from HPE's adoption of "validity as an argument" as a slogan, without integrating theoretical and practical principles of argumentation theory.