Rhetorical Analysis

by [[Claudia Posch]] in [[The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics]]
Definition: ways of finding and interpreting persuasive strategies in language
language of politics is the result of rhetorical creativity and the object of rhetorical analysis
History:
- Has been important since ancient Greece
  - For Aristotle, rhetoric was an essential part of politics (ethical discipline)
  - was practiced in political settings and to persuade citizens of political matters
  - thus rhetoric and politics have always been closely bounded
- over time rhetoric gained a negative connotation (empty words)
- in the twentieth century: increasingly scientific occupation, new research traditiosna dn approaches
Analysis theoretical perspectives (Kienpointner)
- TRADITIONAL OR CLASSICAL
- pre-modern concepts, esp. Aristotelian notions
  - Aristotle:
    - first systematic theory to explore the way persuasion works by analyzing its parts:
    - three means to persuade an audience: ethos (character of the speaker), pathos (emotions of the audience) and logos (arguments in speech). These categories are still used.
    - three speech genres which help making sense of communicative events in context:
      - forensic: judicial. Justness or unjustness of past actions, is a past event justifiable from a present perspective?
      - political: deliberative. Are future political actions advantageous for the estate or not?
      - epideictic (demonstrative): should a person’s present action be praised or chastised?
    - framework to analyse communicative acts: tasks of a speaker and stages of speech:
      - inventio: finding arguments/invention.
        
        arguments can be found in topoi.
        
        28 common arguments
      - dispositio: structuring/arranging
        
        introduction, presentation of facts, argumentation and epilogue
      - elocutio: formulation and style
        
        virtues of style of linguistic expression: grammatical correctness, clarity, adequacy, brevity, embellishment
      - memoria: memory
        
        practice of communication, thinking of the form of presentation and remembering the ideas for presentation
      - actio: delivery
        
        performance of a rhethor
  - Until 20th cent, little changed and rhetoric went out of fashion, reduced to a theory of style
  - Linguistic turn: interest in rhetoric as an important element of public discourse increased again
- New rhetoric
  - Rhetoric today:
    - responsible for displaying public reason and justifying contingent claims in the public formula
    - constitutes a public by understanding and negotiating common bonds, interests, experiences, etc.
  - strongly influenced by [[Chaïm Perelman]] and [[Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca]]
    - they reincorporated rhetoric as a tool into academic discussion
    - their view on rhetoric:
      - theory of plausible argumentation (as opposed to strictly mathematical or logical approaches)
      - a framework to understanding how beliefs and behaviours are shaped by communicative practices and specific communicative events
    - they presented a typology of argumentative schemes
  - other theorists:
    - Stephen Toulmin:
      - Toulmin schema: essential components of argumentation
      - influenced the informal logic research programme
        
        looks at argumentation in everyday language
    - Pragma-dialectics:
      - aims to create a link between formal dialectics and rhetoric
      - pragmatic: influenced by Grice’s speech act theory, logic of conversation and discourse analysis
  - Both models are often integrated with other analytical frameworks (philosophy, social sciences, linguistics: critical discourse studies, discourse historical approach, politolinguistics)
  - Linguistic rhetorical analysis:
    - Meynet states that rhetorical analysis belongs to linguistics because of its object, methods and procedures.
    - politolinguistics: relies on concepts from the political science, rhetorical and discourse-analytical categories
    - Rhetorical analysis is important to analyse political discourse because rhetoric in politics is characterized by persuasiveness (as democracy relies on agreements for decision-making processes)
- Discursive approaches to rhetorical analysis:
  - researcherss of rhetorical criticism or rhetorical theory are not very commonn
  - Discourse-centered approaches: combination of traditional modes of rhetorical criticism with tools of linguistics analysis
    - Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA): stresses the importance of history in the analysis of political discourse. Texts are never isolated. Relationship between power and language. Focus on right wing and populist rhetoric.
- Analysing rhetorical devices
  - public discourse is primarily argumentative
  - thus rhetorical analysis focuses on argumentation analysis based on argumentation schemes and typologies, which have been recently renewed and questioned.
  - 2 main areas:
    - Logical structure analysis of argumentation
      - structures of argumentation are omnipresent in everyday language and more so in everyday political arguments
      - argumentation schemes are useful to analyze the logical structure in arguments/invention.
      - Structures:
        
        most basic: major premise A then conclusion B
        
        but in complex discourse structures are much less transparent: for example, Walton and Hansen’s structure, argument from fairness
      - schemes are not enough to assess an argument profoundly, to do this critical questions about it must be asked
        
        a strict distinction between fallacies and non-fallacies in analyzing arguments is not as useful in everyday language as it is in logic
        
        different evaluation of fallacies that include linguistic and communicative aspects
        
        also, is emotive language acceptable? and when
        
        what we name is just as important as what we do not, so the focus cannot be only on the structure of arguments
    - Semantics of arguments. topics
      - extra logical vocabulary must be considered in argumentation analysis
      - argumentative topoi: the actual meaning of the words in the context of argumentation
        
        topoi: conclusion rules that connect the argument/s with the conclusion or claim. always connected to the context of an argumentation and they proliferate if the range of rhetorical situations is wider. example: the topos of danger and threat (if something is is dangerous, one should do something against it
  - Fallacious arguments:
    - fallacies are deficient arguments (traditional rhetorics)
    - today, fallacies are defined as the violation of rules in argumentation
    - thus in order to distinguish them a normative model is needed
    - Pragma-dialectics provides such rules
    - Critical questions are asked to determine at which point fallacious arguments become unacceptable
    - strategic manouvering are things arguers do to achieve their rhetorical and dialectic goals
  - Figures of speech
    - important instrument in political rhetoric and a main branch of rhetoric since antiquity
    - small rhetorical units, stylistic means
    - focus today is on the mechanisms and structures and are rather viewed as semiotic categories
    - 5 traditional categories:
      - simile
      - metaphor
      - hyperbole
      - personification
      - synecdoche
    - they can operate in different levels of speech:
      - phonetics/phonology (alliteration, assonance, consonance or onomatopoeia)
      - morphology (anaphora, anadiplosis, archaism, epiphora)
      - syntax (ellipsis, parallelism, chiasmus, asyndeton, polysyndeton)
      - semantics (euphemisms, metaphors, metonymies, personifications)
    - can also be categorized according to how they operate:
      - repetition
      - subtraction
      - permutation
      - substitution
  - metaphors:
    - traditionally viewed as subsets of FSP
    - however metaphors are no longer viewed as artificial ornaments in speech, but as instruments that organize the way we think and that are deeply entrenched in the human mind
    - they operate between congnition and emotion and thus provide an important strategy in political speeches
    - conceptual metaphors, which we use to structure our thinking:
      - war metaphors to convey politics
      - sickness or natural catastrophe metaphors to talk about crisis
  - Prospects:
    - computerised methods
    - analysis of large corpora of texts

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