Rhetorical Resources Research Articles

The challenge of dissecting the frog: cartoonists analyze their creative process

Abstract This article delves into two intrinsic tensions present in humor and cartoons: funniness-seriousness and repetition-novelty. The focus is on the perspectives of cartoonists regarding the semiotic and rhetorical resources they put into play to create humor and satire. In this way, the study echoes a key question in semiotics, and particularly in multimodal studies: how image and words interplay in meaning-making. With that aim, a questionnaire was designed and filled out by 100 cartoonists from 22 different countries. The responses were analyzed applying mixed methods (content analysis, non-parametric statistical techniques, and network analysis). Based on the findings, four distinct profiles of cartoonists were identified, ranging from those who prioritize multimodality (the largest group) to those who favor the verbal mode. Cartoonists who prioritize the visual mode and skeptics to humor analysis fall in between. The article also discusses the various rhetorical resources that cartoonists declare to use to create humor, with irony and sarcasm being the most frequent ones, while puns are the least common. The results are examined in relation to the cartoonists’ conceptions of humor, satire, and the cartoon genre, as well as the different dimensions they considered when discussing their humor style. The study contributes to gaining a deeper understanding of the ways cartoonists use image and writing to create humor and satire and sheds light on an under-researched area in this field.

“You’ve Got Me Feeling Emotions”: Affective Norms of Deliberation in the Philippine lgbtqia+ Rights Movement

Abstract In contentious politics and deliberation, emotions function as rhetorical resources to substantiate claims and as evaluative criteria to assess social ties among actors. For social movements, then, emotions are vital in framing demands and sustaining collective participation. Grounded on accounts gathered from Filipinx lgbtqia+ rights movement through oral history interviews and analyzed through narrative and thematic approaches, this article illustrates the role of emotions when adherents deliberate with various interlocutors. I argue that advocates utilize affective ties to expand access to deliberative institutions and to sustain discussions of their claims. I also submit that specific ideologies motivate the idealization of particular affective norms when activists engage specific interlocutors. Hence, emotions figure in the movement both as framing tools and deliberative norms that need to be deliberated as well.

"Cease, Be Dumb and Mute:" George Herbert's Ars Moriendi and the Poetics of Self-Discipline

Abstract: This essay explores how George Herbert's poetry frames apocalypticism in terms of personal mortality to strengthen individual practices of obedience and passivity in one's daily habits. By bringing together the science of daily devotion in the ars moriendi tradition and the imaginative resources of poetry and rhetoric, Herbert's verses locate the site of politics in the management and maintenance of practical, everyday affects. These intersections between early modern poetry and religion render habits of self-discipline in service of political passivity and quiescence, encouraging readers to practice obeying forces larger than oneself—even upon the destabilizing extremities of existential finitude.

La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne, a treatise in response to I donneschi diffetti in the context of the debate on women

The idea of a woman has been devalued and painted as a filthy, cursed being for generations. Passi’s I donneschi diffetti is set in the context of the misogynist tradition which focuses on proving and arguing why the woman is a being that stands out for her inherent inferiority. Lucrezia Marinella, however, was able to change the misogynistic arguments of Passi and a whole tradition anchored to the Aristotelian thesis. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide a comparative reading between two Venice-printed books, I donneschi diffetti (1599) by Giuseppe Passi and La nobiltà et l'educazione delle donne, co diffetti et mancamenti de gli huomini (1601) by Passi, Giuseppe (1603). Lucrezia Marinella. The vilification of women, common in literary, philosophical, and theological studies written in earlier centuries to reflect on women's inferiority, is understood from Passi's work, written as a treatise, the discursive genre of misogynist literature par excellence. In contrast to Passi's misogynistic treatise, Lucrezia Marinella's work, which is set in the querelle des femmes context, although also written in the form of a treatise, aims to highlight the superiority of women through the exercise of virtues. Marinella's work, which has the merit of responding to the misogyny of Passi's treatise, surpasses the preceding work in terms of literary quality, where rhetorical resources and exempla abound, based on a detailed argumentation of the merits of women.

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.

”Det känns inte jättebra”

“Doesn’t feel great” – how digital technology can promote children's telling’s in child investigations The aim was to study children’s participation in child investigations both when a digital application was used and when it was not used. Theoretically, the children’s participation was explored through positioning- and rhetorical analyses of the documentation. In investigative texts where the digital tool was not used, the children’s perspective was presented, but with a lower degree of agency. Two ways of motivating evidence have been identified. One is to alternate the official text, which contains theoretical concepts such as risk and protection factors, with more general descriptions from the child's situation. In the second approach, the genre of authority has been used together with the child’s own words so that the child is given more agency in the investigative text. The proposals for decisions are in both cases presented from the authority genre and legitimised via “the child's best interest” and “risk and protection factors” as well as through weaving in witnesses as a rhetorical resource, where children’s voices might be used as evidence. When comparing child investigations with or without the use of the digital tool, the assessments have similar illations. However, a digital tool adapted to children’s perspectives can increase participation in terms of their agency and presence in the investigative text.

Alchemical rhetoric: the presences and absences of the Jackling-Gemmell Report (1899) in the archives of the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This article rhetorically investigates a missing mining report known as the Jackling-Gemmell Report. Supposedly published in September 1899, this report was the first to scientifically rationalize porphyry, or open-pit, mining methods. Based on my analysis of thousands of archival records at Stanford University’s Daniel Jackling Collection, I argue that this textual absence is sutured by the rhetorical presence of mythopoeia wherein Daniel Jackling has become mythologized as the alchemist that transformed useless rock (i.e., mountains) into pure copper for modern technology. In my analysis of relevant books, letters, and reports, I complicate the textual agency of this alleged report and show how Jackling himself created a powerful public persona as a prophetic hero that predicted the commercial success of porphyry mining. I offer the concept alchemical rhetoric to emphasize how rhetors and rhetoricians create different meanings, identities, and realities from rhetorical resources within an extractive worldview.

“The results might not fully represent…”: Negation in the limitations sections of doctoral theses by Chinese and American students

Abstract The ability to achieve social interaction is both a key feature of research writing and an important aspect of advanced academic literacy. It can be seen in how doctoral students employ rhetorical resources to acknowledge limitations in thesis writing while securing a positive view of the research. Negation is one of the crucial interactional options, but less explored in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) literature. In this study, we drew on the appraisal theory to see negation as a disclaim marker that engaged with alternative positions and employed corpus analysis to examine the forms and functions of negation in the ‘limitations’ section of doctoral theses. To better understand how student writers exploit negation to achieve the rhetorical end, we further explored co-articulations of negation with other appraisal resources. A corpus-based analysis of 100 doctoral theses by Chinese and American doctoral students in applied linguistics showed that American students made significantly more use of negation, especially pairing negation with engagement and graduation resources. We attribute the difference to genre and culture norms and also raise pedagogical implications on the cultivation of students’ rhetorical awareness and the classroom teaching of research writing.

Black Women’s Commemorative Recovery: Strategic Ambiguity as a Rhetorical Resource in The Embrace

When The Embrace, a monument to Martin and Coretta King, was unveiled in Boston in 2023, it drew mixed reactions from various quarters of the public. Some observers praised the statue for its representation of the Kings as a couple and praised the universal themes of love and unity they read into it, while others criticized its disembodied presentation and suggested it was not an appropriate commemoration of the work performed by such venerated figures. A significant element in the public’s interpretation of the monument involved its location in Boston, a city widely perceived to be uniquely plagued by memories of racist reaction. In this essay, I argue that, in a discursive context in which enduring memories of racist reaction constitute part of the city’s place meaning, the monument’s ambiguous presentation functions as an important rhetorical resource in recovering narratives of Black women’s agency during the civil rights movement. The resourcefulness of this form of strategic ambiguity is strengthened when the erection of monuments in prominent public spaces comprises an important element of contemporary campaigns to achieve racial justice.

Disintermediation and disinformation as a political strategy: use of AI to analyse fake news as Trump’s rhetorical resource on Twitter

The communicative effects of disintermediation caused by social media promote the expansion of personalist and emotional political discourses that reach the audience directly and evade the traditional journalistic filter. This phenomenon leads to new political communication tactics, but also exposes citizens to potentially fraudulent, contaminated or polarised content. In this context, framed in post-truth, the term ‘fake news’ gains relevance as a way of referring to disinformation and as a political and performative argument that can be weaponised. This research aims to analyse such use in the discourse of the former president Donald Trump during his presidential term (2017-2021), focussing on Twitter as the main platform in his political communication strategy online. To analyse this, we resort to a methodological triangulation of content, discourse, and sentiment analysis, with the latter combining both lexicon and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques through machine learning on the basis of deep learning and natural language processing, which is applied to his messages published with the term ‘fake news’ (N = 768). The analysis of the sample, provided here in an open dataset, employs self-developed software that allows each unit of analysis to be filtered and coded around its predominant themes, sentiments, and words. The main results confirm that Trump’s attribution of ‘fake news’ focusses on three main topics: the media (53%), politics (40%) and his cabinet (33%). It also shows how the former president resorts to a personalist agenda, focussed on the defence of his proposals and his team (80%) by delegitimizing his opponents and the press, with a negative tone (72%) loaded with derogatory terms, confirming a weaponised strategy of the term ‘fake news’ as a political argument of disinformation and disintermediation.

The Image of the Arab World in the Spanish and Latin American Journalistic Discourse: Immigration as an Example

Spain's and Latin America's perception of Arabs is conditioned by a set of labels. This article aims to study the (re)presentation of the figure of the Arab immigrant in both Spanish and Latin American journalistic discourse. The researchers, through the use of a series of lexical and rhetorical resources, demonstrate that, this discourse effectively contributes to the generation of labels about the population of the study in question. Our corpus of analysis is essentially made up of newspaper articles with national and local circulation (El Mundo, El Diario de Sevilla, El Tiempo, Libertad Digital, etc.). The methodology followed in the analysis is based on the theories of Van Dijk about discourse and racism in Spain and Latin America.

Gorgias's Encomium to Helen as an Existential and Protreptic Logos: Self-reflexivity, Temporality, and the Four Causes

Abstract: Gorgias's Encomium of Helen stands out as more than a display speech: it is a sophisticated statement on fifth century Greek life. Within a mythic framework, it presents Gorgias's post-Eleatic understanding of the world, including new ways of conceiving the logos within the finite boundaries of human life. I show how Gorgias's thoughts build out of Empedocles's cosmology and stylistics, leading Gorgias to consider more deeply how language and world go together. I demonstrate that the order of Gorgias's four causes is cyclical, which allows Gorgias to make gradated distinctions about responsibility. Gorgias's exploration of responsibility enables him to portray the world as something that continually marks and molds human being, and this includes the logos . Gorgias also addresses temporality, which not only imposes existential limits on human capacity but also contours language itself. Ultimately, the Helen conducts third-order (self-reflexive) thinking by marshalling a battery of rhetorical resources designed to attune an audience to how their own participation in the logos generates and sustains its powers. In effect, what the Helen is about is the work that the Helen does. Through a mixture of new insights into persuasion, language, temporality, and psychology, combined with self-reflexive rhetorical work, the Helen inspires further thought about key aspects of Greek existence.

The Birth of the Genre and Rhetorical Strategies of the Writer’s Diary of 1873

The article studies the role of Dostoevsky’s editorial activity in the newspaper-magazine “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”) in the formation of genre features and rhetorical strategies of the Writer’s Diary of 1873. The author of the article believes that the new form, which arose at the intersection of journalism and fiction, was mainly due to the prospeech attitudes of editorial policy, which simultaneously persuaded the highest strata of the Russian bureaucracy to put an end to the liberal reforms of Alexander II and at the same time tries to expand the circle of readers who adhere to a different social orientation.Creating a new form of Diary as a literary work, Dostoevsky actively used the resources of rhetoric, while also preserving the achievements in the field of poetic peculiar means such as the paradoxical enthymeme, the reception of implied word? The use of metalanguage and metatext procedures, irony, and parody techniques.The author of the writer’s Diary actively used non-traditional motives for previous works – false oblivion, masks, obsessions. A number of changes can also be found in such traditional genres of rhetoric as preaching and confession. Having left the post of editor of “The Citizen” at the beginning of 1874, Dostoevsky continued genre and rhetorical experiments, but he was no longer bound by the position of the magazine, which created greater creative freedom in the development of new forms.

MODERN METHODOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF THE RHETORICAL COMPETENCE FORMATION OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The article analyzes the problem of rhetorical competence formation of university students in the process of teaching Ukrainian for special purposes and proposes ways to solve it. Some aspects of the methodological system are proposed. Attention is focused on the peculiarities of students' rhetorical competence formation in the conditions of distance learning, in particular on the use of interactive forms and methods of distance learning, which contribute to the linguistic personality formation of the future specialist. One of the main tasks of higher education is the formation of rhetorical competence of university students. The approaches of scientists to the concepts of “rhetorical competence” and “formation of rhetorical competence” were analyzed and the conditions of rhetorical competence formation in the conditions of distance education were substantiated. It was found that scientific studies consider rhetorical competence as the ability to design effective and optimal communication for the speech situation; to realize one's own rhetorical resources in the process of professional activity, to increase the professional language image. Rhetorical education affects the formation of the language image and the trajectory of the professional career of the future specialist. Rhetorical competence involves the formation of personal qualities, the development of thinking, speech, the ability to conduct business communication according to the rules of etiquette. The process of rhetorical competence formation requires updating the methodical system, building the specifics of practical classes in the conditions of a distance learning mode and the complex realities of wartime in Ukraine.

A comparative corpus-based investigation of results sections of research articles in Applied Linguistics and Physics

Abstract The present study sought to identify the generic structures of the results sections of scientific research articles (RAs) between Applied Linguistics and Physics. Following a manual search approach, a total of 200 RAs in the field of Applied Linguistics and Physics from different top prestigious journals randomly were singled out and analyzed. In addition to offering a tentative template for the rhetorical organizations of results sections, the findings revealed shared and non-shared rhetorical units as well as obligatory and optional steps in the results sections (RSs) of research articles between the disciplines. The findings also indicated that RA writers organize the contents of the RSs around certain rhetorical resources (i.e., M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5) to present key experimental and factual analytical results of their studies. The findings further suggested the existence of common core of rhetorical resources in writing RSs between the disciplines, albeit there are a set of certain steps playing an essential part in distinguishing textual features of each discipline as well as depicting how RSs of individual discipline are developed. The findings generated from the study can offer a number of important pedagogical implications for teaching EAP and ESP courses, especially for Applied Linguistics and Physics teachers and students.

Controversies about the inheritance of sustainability models in the Brazilian beef chain

This essay aims to propose a sustainability model applied to the Brazilian beef production chain. The proposed model seeks to integrate the sustainability indicators of the corporate models and the names of the literature, having as reference the incorporation of the Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) principles to the cosmovision of the Stakeholder Capitalism Model. The literature review, based on previous models on sustainability, showed that these models have gaps that need to be filled so that the materiality matrix of Socio-Environmental Reports (CSR) is effectively contemplated so that one can go beyond the rhetorical resources disseminated as greenwashing in various sustainability publications. The objective of this essay resulted in the presentation to the academy of a specific methodological tool to be applied along the beef production chain that contemplates the ESG materiality matrix in line with the Declaration of the Davos Manifesto in 2020.

Assessment of students’ understanding of physical phenomena through argumentative qualities of written texts

We present a qualitative study aimed at devising a theoretical-methodological tool to assess students’ conceptual understanding of physical phenomena through the argumentative qualities of their written texts. The proposed relationship between argumentation and understanding is elaborated through the notions of knowledge, purposes, methods, and communicative forms, as well as the use of data, warrants, modal qualifiers, claims, and rhetorical resources. In order to exemplify the tool’s use, the current understanding of six students attending a physics seedbed course was assessed according to four levels: naïve, novice, apprentice, and mastery. We then discuss the possibilities and limitations of the tool and the need to broaden the assessment of students’ understanding to include argumentative tasks in the classroom.

Securing the Youth Vote: A Comparative Analysis of Digital Persuasion on TikTok Among Political Actors

In the context of “pop politics” and “politainment,” the irruption of TikTok has changed the landscape of social media and become the fastest-growing application among young people. Based on the peculiarities of the social platform’s affordances and the political personalization approach, we explore the differences between political parties and political leaders in terms of digital persuasion on TikTok in Spain and Poland. This work contributes to the scarce knowledge about the strategic use of TikTok for political purposes. It also attempts to fill the gap in the comparative research into the practical uses of TikTok in different political contexts. The study explores the three classical persuasion appeals—pathos, ethos, and logos—based on a visual, quantitative analysis of <em>N</em> = 372 videos posted on the official TikTok profiles of the main political parties and leaders from January 1st to March 31st, 2022. Differences were found in how political parties and political leaders used TikTok’s affordances as well as in the main rhetorical resource they use to persuade. We noted the use of more rational resources (logos) in the case of political parties and more emotional resources<em> </em>(pathos) for political leaders. Further, the rare presence of the personality in the videos of the political actors (ethos), along with their unusual privatization role, indicate that personalization on TikTok is far from being considered as part of their digital persuasion strategy.

Fashion and Feminist Art: Outside Voices in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior Shows

This article focuses on the public discourse of fashion and art, and the visibility of the political values implied by DIOR’s entry into public space through its collaboration with feminist art. I will explore the reshaping of feminist discourse through an analysis of designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s (b. 1964) design practice for DIOR in recent years, and the feminist artworks that she incorporates into the shows. I will focus on three DIOR shows as examples: 2017 Spring/Summer Ready-to-Wear, 2020 Spring/Summer Haute Couture, and 2020 Fall/Winter Ready-to-Wear. These shows demonstrate that feminist art and fashion can become interdependent when they are used as rhetorical tools. While women cannot liberate themselves through consumption, clothing nevertheless serves as a rhetorical resource through which commodity culture can communicate and thereby create public spaces that allow women and fashion to become more valuable and defiant. I argue that while Chiuri’s design practice is a commercial success, it can also be used to resist the hegemony of gender domination. The discourse of art is often appropriated and manipulated by key players in the fashion industry, and if feminist art is a symbol of women taking power, Chiuri’s work demonstrates that it can be part of an effort to challenge the suppression of women’s voices in the public sphere while also highlighting the value and creativity of fashion.

RHETORICAL RESOURCES IN POLITICAL SPEECHES: A CASE OF 2022 PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH CAMPAIGN DISCOURSE IN KENYA

This paper analyzed rhetorical resources in political speeches of 2022 presidential speech campaign discourse in Kenya. The 9th August 2022 elections in Kenya reflected the new dynamics in political environment. Consequently, the new dynamics reshaped the political discourse in Kenya from ethnics rhetoric’s to real issue based rhetoric’s. The study applied Faircloughs (1989, 2001) Critical Discourse Analysis theory. The study focused on political campaign speeches of two candidates only; former Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Kenya’s Deputy President William Ruto then. The research adopted a descriptive qualitative research design. The study used purpose sampling to select the speeches. Primary data (speeches, party manifestos and campaign video clips) as well as secondary data (newspapers and online sources) were used to critically analyze the aspect of rhetorical resources in 2022 presidential speeches. Documentary reviews and checklist were used to collect the specific rhetorical devices. The findings of the study revealed that both the presidential candidates employed propagated their ideologies through rhetorical resources such as repetition, pronoun and voice, three part list, metaphor and analogies. It is hoped that the study is beneficial in terms of theory and practice and in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and applied linguistics. The study also provides useful insights to politicians, political analysts and researchers who have immense interest in political speeches.