# 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