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