Rhetorical Effects Research Articles

Psychological effects of anti-Arab politics on American and Arab peoples' views of each other.

Disparaging rhetoric about Arab people was prevalent during Donald Trump's political rise in the United States. Although this rhetoric was intended to energize conservative Americans, it also echoed throughout many liberal parts of the United States and around the world. In this research, we experimentally examined the effects of such rhetoric on American and Arab people's attitudes and visual representations of each other before and after Trump was elected. Although people overwhelmingly reported not liking the negative rhetoric, the rhetoric alone did not influence explicit and implicit intergroup biases in either location, as measured by feeling thermometers and Implicit Association Tests. However, the election outcome moderated the way rhetoric influenced how American and Arab people visually represented each other. Our research sheds light on nuanced effects of global politics on various information processing stages within intergroup perception.

Steve Oswald: Pragmatics and rhetoric

Does the search for perlocutionary effectiveness (getting people to agree with a claim, to buy a product, etc.) without truth or morality playing a decisive role constitute what some call manipulation? Precisely because he is interested in the mechanisms of persuasion, Steve Oswald has woven links between cognitive science and rhetoric around this notion. Drawing on theories of cognitive pragmatics and work in psychology, this researcher goes off the beaten track of rhetoric by opening what is for many a black box: the question of the effects of discursive strategies. He has approached this question first by attempting to explain the mechanism theoretically, but more recently also experimentally. Examining the question of rhetorical effects in this way makes it possible not only to revitalise the discipline by documenting the intuitions or empirical findings of the old rhetoricians, but also to build bridges between approaches that sometimes ignore each other: informal logic, cognitive psychology, cognitive pragmatics, and discourse analysis.

Context and coordination in discourse

Sentences including their deictic information are elementary discourse units linked in constituent structures. They are bound to information from their discourse contexts, and their linking produces rhetorical effects. Discourse is a sequence of linked sentences bound to their discourse contexts. Each sentence or elementary discourse unit is linked to others by means of the information it requires to be interpreted, obtained from its discourse context and its deictic information. Discourse context is the source for the additional information needed for the linking of discourse units and their interpretation in discourse constituent structures, producing the intended intentional rhetorical effects in texts. Subordination in discourse relations between units is analyzed in terms of their topics and frames. Coordination with sentence-initial and has subordination-to-the-left properties in the discourse constituent structure. These properties of discourse coordination, including focus and wider scope, are shown to be effective tools to build and organize, by means of discourse coordination, complex discourse units that represent rhetorical moves in texts.

Are You Talking to Me? How Ideological and Gender Characteristics Moderate the Effect of Legitimizing Rhetoric on SCOTUS Legitimacy

Possessing neither purse nor sword, the unelected US Supreme Court relies on sustained public confidence in its institutional credibility to give force to its decisions. Previous research shows that Supreme Court justices are increasingly making public appearances to engage in a course of institutional maintenance to preserve its legitimacy. Amid a potential legitimacy crisis, justices seek to shore up the Court’s public support in these public appearances by emphasizing the apolitical nature of the Court and its decision making. The question for a growing body of literature is whether these attempts at institutional maintenance do, in fact, lead to higher support for the Court. Using an original survey experiment where we manipulate the identity of the justice giving legitimizing rhetoric, we find that respondents’ ideological preferences and female respondents’ level of gender identity do impact the effectiveness of such rhetoric. These results build on previous work by demonstrating the importance of justice identity in conditioning how different ideologues respond to the Court’s elite signals.

Canadian politicians' rhetoric on Twitter/X: Analysing prejudice and inclusion towards Muslims using structural topic modelling and rhetorical analysis.

We analysed tweets from five English-speaking Canadian political parties in the year leading up to the 2019 federal election to explore both prejudicial and inclusive rhetoric in relation to Muslim identities on social media. We used structural topic modelling to understand what topics were discussed before moving to a rhetorical approach to analyse how topics were discussed. We identified 10 topics. Seven talked about Muslim groups in primarily inclusive ways, including depicting the positive contributions to Canadian society, creating ideological space for Muslim religious practices and invoking superordinate identities with victims of hate crimes to cultivate solidarity. However, the effectiveness of inclusive rhetoric was sometimes questioned due to omitting the subgroup-specific prejudice faced by Muslims. Prejudicial rhetoric occurred in three of the topics due to the nativist populist PPC party depicting Muslims as a threat to Canadian values, as hostile to people from other religious faiths, and depicting 'elites' in society as concealing the 'true' information concerning Muslims. The study contributes to understanding how politicians attempt to cultivate minority inclusion/exclusion in multicultural contexts through social media, as well as understanding the rhetoric of nativist populism in Canada and its similarities to other Global North contexts.

Pragma-dialectical perspective to intercultural discussion as communicative activity

The core idea of Pragma-dialectical Theory is critical discussion which means resolving disagreement via argumentative dialogues. The Pragmatic-dialectic Model describing critical discussion has not only reasonableness and validness in logic, but also rhetorical effectiveness and pragmatic properties in intra-cultural context. However, the model cannot appropriately describe intercultural discussion since the discussants try to negotiate both in meaning and in divergence. People from different cultures do not necessarily behave pragmatically in the same way. In order to better describe the process of intercultural discussion, an exploratory approach was taken to first propose modifications of the model and then to confirm the modified model in a case study. The modifications include two aspects: first, its rhetorical and pragmatic properties can be expanded by taking Burke’s “Identification” and by replacing “speech acts” with more comprehensive “pragmatic acts”; second, the argumentation stage can be explored further with “motivation” and “mediation” added to the model. The case study reveals that the discussants with the motivation to seek common substances could take proper pragmatic acts to negotiate on certain substances, and that the mediation by the third party and by the discussants exerted influence both on the motivation and on the pragmatic acts. The modified model is expected to broaden the application scope of Pragma-dialectical theory to intercultural communication, and to better explain many kinds of intercultural discussions.

Kyrie Irving, vaccine hesitancy, and the politics of rugged individualism

ABSTRACT NBA superstar Kyrie Irving has a well-earned reputation for both his elite talent and his unpredictable public commentary. Such expressions have included references to the Earth being flat, advocacy for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and reluctance to proceed with the 2020 basketball season in the midst of a pandemic and resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. He has become most notorious, however, for his refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a position that earned him both praise and scorn. We argue in this article that Irving’s stance prioritizes a form of rugged individualism characterized by neoliberal politics and professional sport. His retreat into rugged individualism contributed to delegitimizing public health policies and prompted vocal defenses of his actions from political conservatives who had condemned his earlier forms of activism. The controversy over Irving’s vaccine hesitancy spotlights the rhetorical effect of his ambiguous voice and its implications for democratic contestation. More specifically, it speaks to the challenges of prioritizing the public good under the conditions of neoliberal political culture.

The (in)effectiveness of populist rhetoric: a conjoint experiment of campaign messaging

Abstract Is populism electorally effective and, if so, why? Scholars agree that populism is a set of people-centric, anti-pluralist, and anti-elitist ideas that can be combined with various ideological positions. It is difficult, yet important, to disentangle populism from its hosting ideology in evaluating populism's effectiveness and its potential conditional effects on the hosting ideology. We conduct a novel US conjoint experiment asking respondents to evaluate pairs of realistic campaign messages with varying populism-related messages and hosting policy positions given by hypothetical primary candidates. Although party-congruent policy positions are expectedly much more popular, we find that none of the populist features have an independent or combined effect on candidate choice.

Proverbs as an agent of cultural wisdom and identity among the Xhosa speaking people

Abstract The Xhosa speaking people, in common with other African people, possess a rich folklore tradition comprising mostly of tales, proverbs, riddles and poetry. Of these verbal arts, proverbs are by far the most frequently employed, in a number of ways for different purposes. In their daily communication, the Xhosa speaking people often resort to proverbs as an important and most effective strategy to optimize the rhetorical effectiveness of their speech messages. Because proverbs are frequently used in normal, everyday speech situations, the Xhosa speaking people, like any other African communities, assign great socio-cultural importance to the proverbs. This paper explores the moral nature and significance of the Xhosa proverbs which contribute to the norms and conventions and cultural wisdom well-ordered society. In the Xhosa culture, a feeling for language, imagery and expression of abstract ideas through compressed and allusive phraseology is realized in proverbs. Data were gathered from two published sources in Xhosa language titled Izaci namaqhalo esiXhosa by EWM Mesatywa (1954) and IsiXhosa 4 by JA du Plessis (1978). The data for this paper also included my knowledge, experience and introspection, based on being a Xhosa native speaker and experienced academic in language-related culture dimensions of African languages.

Between Domestication and Foreignization: A Study of How an Italian Film Remake Got Lost in Translation in the Arab World

Film remakes represent a form of cinematic translation that reconstructs various elements of the original text. This article relies on the translation strategies of domestication and foreignization to analyze “Āṣḥāb Wālā Āʿāz”, the Arabic remake of the Italian film “Perfetti Sconosciuti” or “Perfect Strangers”. This study shows that the Arabic remake, which sparked controversy across the Middle East, replicates many of the syntactic elements of the original film, such as the narrative and the plot structure, as well as cinematographic and paralinguistic elements. Still, it attempts to adopt a transformative approach in order to generate a cultural production. The result shows that the use of domestication in film remakes alters the rhetorical effect of the original version and that, although foreignization may promote an audience’s interest in foreign cultures, it may contribute to the reproduction of otherness due to the dissatisfaction of the targeted audiences.

The Rhetoric of Ghanaian Religious Communication

Abstract This paper examines the rhetoric of Ghana’s religious communication. Meta-analysis of the rhetorical situation of Ghanaian religious communication was conducted to examine how rhetoric has been used in Ghanaian society. Thus, the paper analyzed the effectiveness of religious rhetoric as a tool for religious propagation. It examined various forms of communication such as preaching, singing, dancing and selling of souvenirs in churches from the perspective of rhetoric. The theoretical framework included popular varieties of rhetoric, religious communication, content analysis of the rhetoric of religious situations in Ghana, and a semiotic analysis of souvenirs sold by some Ghanaian pastors. Suppression, avoidance, adjustment, and accommodation were examined as rhetorical tools of religious control. The study also postulated that religion and communication through the media are interwoven due to the rhetorical aspects that bind the two concepts in shaping the authority, dominance and ideologies of religious identities in Ghana.

Absolved from the neoliberal burden of responsibility: The effect of populist victim rhetoric on leader support

AbstractA common explanation for the success of populists is that they rhetorically shift blame for their followers' hardships toward “elites,” therefore creating a culpable outgroup. However, we argue that there are two confounded effects at play here: shifting blame toward an outgroup and shifting blame away from oneself. Therefore, we theorize that above and beyond elite blame, victimization rhetoric heightens leader support because it specifically relieves followers of the pressure of having to take responsibility for negative life outcomes, especially when they subscribe to neoliberal competition ideology. Supporting our predictions, we show via a survey that victim rhetoric increases leader support while controlling for elite blame, especially among people subscribing to neoliberal competition ideology. In a subsequent experiment, we replicate the findings causally and show that the effect works by reducing perceived personal responsibility for negative life outcomes. Our results indicate that populist rhetoric involves shifting blame toward others and away from oneself. This can explain some of the conundrums that have plagued the literature, such as why elites also fall for populist rhetoric. We discuss our findings in relation to cultural differences and differences in left‐ versus right‐wing populism.

Analog to Digital and Back Again: The Rhetoric of Graffiti

While current approaches to theorizing rhetorical circulation often designate digital rhetorics as their object of study, this designation unintentionally closes off rhetorical inquiry. Analog, material rhetorics, like graffiti, resemble digital rhetoric in the circulation of their rhetorical effects. The study of graffiti rhetorics therefore invites a recursive application of theoretical models of rhetorical circulation. By analyzing examples of bathroom graffiti collected from a large college campus, this essay seeks to inform fresh models of rhetorical circulation that more fully account for the many diverse and interrelated systems from which the full meaning of any one instance of rhetoric is derived.

Norm-violating rhetoric undermines support for participatory inclusiveness and political equality among Trump supporters.

Over the last decade, the United States has seen increasing antidemocratic rhetoric by political leaders. Yet, prior work suggests that such norm-violating rhetoric does not undermine support for democracy as a system of government. We argue that, while that may be true, such rhetoric does vitiate support for specific democratic principles. We test this theory by extending prior work to assess the effects of Trump's norm-violating rhetoric on general support for democracy as well as for the principles of participatory inclusiveness, contestation, the rule of law, and political equality. We find that Trump's rhetoric does not alter attitudes toward democracy as a preferred system but does reduce support for inclusiveness and equality among his supporters. Our findings suggest that elite rhetoric can undermine basic principles of American democracy.

Wordplay in 1 Corinthians

Abstract This essay provides the first attempt at a complete inventory and assessment of the use of wordplay in 1 Corinthians. It is organized by attending to the various linguistic features that are exploited to create wordplays. These include the use of different lexemes based on the same root (i.e., sharing etymology; compound words) used in close proximity; the use of the same lexeme but with different meanings in different genders, used in close proximity to exploit the euphony; the use of the same word/lexeme with different meanings in close proximity; the use of the same word with the same meaning twice in close proximity but in a context that plays on an inversion or twist while also exploiting the soundplay; and the use of different lexemes with similar sounds employed for the sake of the surprising rhetorical effect of connecting the two words. It also analyses the kinds of wordplay opportunities that each linguistic feature tends to provide or create. Additionally, it discusses the challenges that different wordplays create for translation (with a focus on translation into English). In the process, the ubiquity and significance of wordplays in 1 Corinthians is demonstrated.

Metaphorical framing of children’s digital media addiction in media discourse

The paper investigates figurative construal of children’s excessive use of electronic devices in articles that tackle the issues of children’s media addiction, as well as concentration and attention span, which are considered to be affected by this excessive use of technology. In giving their opinion on the topic, authors of articles resort to the use conceptual metaphor – a cognitive device where more abstract concept (a target domain) is being understood through the use of another, more concrete concept (a source domain). Authentic language data reveal the use of metaphorical linguistic expressions such as ‘digital overdose’ and ‘electronic cocaine’, which send a disturbing message that children are ‘overdosing’. This detailed analysis aims to investigate: (a) the types of metaphor (according to Steen’s 2010 three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis) in articles on children’s media addiction; (b) whether ADDICTION metaphors are dominant and deliberate; (c) their communicative function – the rhetorical function intended by the authors, as well as their rhetorical effects on recipients (notably, parents);(d) the implications of their combination with other metaphors within a sentence or a paragraph; (e) the possibility of resorting to alternative metaphor use.

Exploring the Effect of Anti-immigration Rhetoric on Emergency Department Use by Undocumented Adults.

An unwelcoming policy climate can create barriers to health care access and produce a 'Chilling Effect' among immigrant communities. For undocumented immigrants, barriers may be unique and have a greater impact. We used administrative emergency department (ED) data from 2015 to 2019 for a Midwestern state provided under a data use agreement with the state hospital association. General linear modelling was used to estimate the impact of anti-immigrant rhetoric on ED visit intensity among non-elderly adults who were likely Hispanic/Latino with undocumented status. Compared to 2015, the average ED visit intensity among adults who were likely Hispanic/Latino with undocumented status was significantly higher during 2016-2019 when anti-immigrant rhetoric was heightened. The magnitude of this change increased over time (0.013, 0.014, 0.021, and 0.020, respectively). Additionally, this change over time was not observed in the comparison groups. Our findings suggest that anti-immigrant rhetoric may alter health care utilization for adults who are likely Hispanic/Latino with undocumented status. Limitations to our findings include the use of only those likely to be Hispanic/Latino, data from only one Midwestern state and the loss of data due to non-classification using the NYU ED algorithm. Further research should focus on validating these findings and investigating these identification methods and anti-immigrant rhetoric effects among other undocumented groups including children and adults of different race or ethnicity such as black, both those that identify as Hispanic/Latino and those that do not. Developing strategies to improve health care access for undocumented Hispanic/Latino adults also warrants future research.

The Making of Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-dialectical View

In ‘The making of argumentation theory’ van Eemeren and van Haaften describe the contributions made to the five components of a full-fledged research program of argumentation theory by four prominent approaches to the discipline: formal dialectics, rhetoric/pragmalinguistics, informal logic, and pragma-dialectics. Most of these approaches do not contribute to all components, but to some in particular. Starting from the pragma-dialectical view of the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness – the crucial issue in argumentation theory – van Eemeren and van Haaften explain the positions taken by representatives from the approaches discussed and indicate where they differ from the pragma-dialectical approach. It transpires that approaches focusing on dialectical reasonableness are, next to pragma-dialectics, formal dialectics and informal logic; approaches focusing on rhetorical effectiveness are, next to pragma-dialectics, rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, and the informal logician Tindale. When it comes to the relationship between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness, some interest in it is shown in rhetoric and pragmalinguistics, but only in pragma-dialectics and in Tindale’s work is it a real focus. The main difference between Tindale’s view and the pragma-dialectical view is that in pragma-dialectics the decisive role in deciding about reasonableness is assigned to a code of conduct for reasonable argumentative discourse and in Tindale’s approach this role is assigned to Tindale’s interpretation of the Perelmanian universal audience.

METAPHORICAL FRAMINGS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE PRESS REPORTS ABOUT CHATGPT

Through a combined quantitative-qualitative approach the paper aims to explore the densities and possible rhetorical effects of the most common metaphorical framings used in the New York Times online press reports about ChatGPT. The theoretical framework is based on the main tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 2003[1980]), frame semantics (Fillmore 1982), and image schema theory (Johnson 1987). The initial stage involved the construction of a small specialized corpus which was tagged manually for the analysis in WordSmith Tools 6.0. Metaphor identification was conducted in line with MIPVU (STEEN et al. 2010). Quantitative analysis showed the highest density for containment, motion, and force metaphors. Living being, tool, conflict, and machine metaphors were also present, but not as frequent. The linear regression model (motion, force, living being) explained 61% of variance in the density of containment metaphors, and it was significant (p=.002). Additional linear regression models have also been tested. The results suggest the potential for interaction of these metaphor groups when they cooccur in discourse (i.e., they may work in concert to construct a specific viewpoint). Qualitative analysis showed a range of possible rhetorical effects that the identified metaphorical framings may play (e.g., making AI more appealing by framing it as a living being or tool, raising doubts about the use of AI by constructing borders and containers, or framing AI as a threat). Results of qualitative analysis should be understood as testable hypotheses that remain to be further explored and validated in experimental settings.

The interpersonal semantics of rhetoric

Abstract Different from previous linguistic studies on rhetoric, which primarily concern the ideational semantics and the logic of sentences, this article attempts to deal systematically with the interpersonal semantics of rhetoric by drawing on the comprehensive appraisal framework of systemic functional linguistics (Martin and White 2005) and explores the mechanism of rhetorical persuasion in science communication via appraisal through a case study of the gene-modification (GM) debate in China. It first examines the rhetorical appeals of the subsystems of appraisal and then based on a self-constructed and coded corpus of GM debate discourses, it compares how institutional (the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and the Greenpeace Organization) and individual stakeholders (Cui Yongyuan and Fang Zhouzi) of different ideological interests in the GM debate mobilize the interpersonal semantic resources to rhetorical effects to persuade the audience of the safety/danger of the GM technology and products. The analysis reveals that while the opinion leaders choose ‘soft’ persuasion by heavily using affect and judgement resources, the institutions opt for ‘hard’ persuasion by utilizing more appreciation resources. The four parties all prefer contracting resources over expanding resources of engagement, which restricts the space of negotiation. Their communicative motives are interpreted through the lens of the rhetoric theory, and the implications and consequences for science communication in the post-truth era are discussed. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding the persuasion mechanism of appraisal and to understanding the science vs. society, and government vs. citizens relationship.