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Rhetoric: The Art of Verbal Persuasian If It Deals With Power or Resistance, It Is Considered Political Strategic Functions

The document discusses various linguistic techniques used in political rhetoric and discourse, including the use of pronouns, verbs, speech acts, directives, promises, and metaphors to position speakers and their messages. It covers topics like implicature, presupposition, euphemism, analogies, and the rule of three. The document also examines how metaphors of liquids are used differently by right-wing and left-wing political groups and how discourse can be technologized and engineered to shape social change.

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Bobby Chen
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
33 views

Rhetoric: The Art of Verbal Persuasian If It Deals With Power or Resistance, It Is Considered Political Strategic Functions

The document discusses various linguistic techniques used in political rhetoric and discourse, including the use of pronouns, verbs, speech acts, directives, promises, and metaphors to position speakers and their messages. It covers topics like implicature, presupposition, euphemism, analogies, and the rule of three. The document also examines how metaphors of liquids are used differently by right-wing and left-wing political groups and how discourse can be technologized and engineered to shape social change.

Uploaded by

Bobby Chen
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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• rhetoric : the art of verbal persuasian

• if it deals with power or resistance, it is considered political


• strategic functions:
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• ask about the links between linguistic choices and strategic functions,

• speech acts in politics:

• ;frequency of pronouns

• using I alot: define the speaker as authoritative source of information or knowledge


and define audiences as subordinate, uninformed and unknowledgeable- coerces
hearers into certain communication and political roles and legitimize speaker;
• use of verbs that belong to semantic fields associated with speaking feeling and
action, so they position major in discourse as truthful narrator or messenger and man of
action; the acts of speaking include the right to criticize and condemn kinds of speaking
allegedly indulged in by others and include power to utter certain kinds of speech acts
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• speaker needs to manufacture or assume internal consensus and external dissensus,


and claim consensus extends to nation as a whole; legitimizing function
• use of pronouns:

• directives are part of the coercion function


• indirect speech acts: its time to .... , which makes hearer assume they need to take
some action
• speech act of urging: let’s
• promise performatives are dissimulation function
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• metaphor

• passive construction can omit overt reference to the agent


• syntax is
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• thematic roles:

• subject, verb, object, goal(prepositional phrase): the government, sent, troops, to


china
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• politics defined broadly is any social relationship which deals with power, governing
and authority
• we can be inclusive and exclusive: inclusive includes people being addresses,
exclusive refers to self some other people not the addressees
• metaphor is givin the thing a name that belongs to something else; to create pictures
in our minds, connections are made between concepts that we might not have
considered as related
• simile is saying something is like something else
• metaphors are used to connect concepts in a way that is beneficial for the speaker in
politics
• the rule of three can make things easier to remember and is used when trying to make
an important point; a rhythm that is pleasing and often persuasive
• similar syntactic structure: parallelism
• contrastive pairs suggest balance, help to emphasize positive and suggest issues that
are easily resolved into two contrasting views
• euphemism: highlight positive, background negative; while dysphemism is vice versa
• presupposition is assumed only by particular form of sentence; implicature isn’t
confined to form of sentence and it is a conventional conclusion we come to based on
what is said, depends on what we know about the world and the communicative
situation
• implicatures can be defeased or countered and depend on shared knowledge
• possessives are the use of my, their, etc.
• adjectives, esp. comparative ones: better, noble
• subordinate clauses
• questions:if you say yes or no, you accept presupposition and if you don’t respond,
you risk appearing uncooperative
• incidents are unhappy events
• implicatures and presuppositions give author a get out clause
• political parties have ingroup communicative rules and norms
• conversational dominance: interruption, no response, delayed response, remaining
silent
• -->metaphors

• about immigrants:

• liquid or water metaphors are not so much


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• the more right wing you are, the more you refer to bursting and disasters
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• right wing is conservatism


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• In linguistics, entailment is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (A)
requires the truth of the other
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• A metaphorical entailment is the imparting of a characteristic of the source domain (the


metaphorical image) to the target domain (the concept receiving metaphorical treatment) by
logical means.
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• topos is place where arguments are found


• cheater-detection module arouses anger, indicates breaking social contract
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• properties of informal talk:

• mitigation:

• subtle denials: use of quotations and using allege and claim


• reversal, positive self presentation
• denial and counter attack: marginalize the other group, ideological implications, believe
ordinary people are us and they are the crazy ones
• moral blackmail: the fear that any criticism will lead to charges – is a powerful disincentive to
publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of true views
• defense and offense:

• reversal:

• face keeping and impression management


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• technologization of discourse: strategies, procedures by means of which different forces seek to
render programmes operable, the networks and relays that connect the aspiration of authorities
with the activities of individuals and groups
• combines: research into the discoursal practices of workpalces and institutions, design of
discoursal practices in accordance with institutional strategies and objectives, and training
personnel in such designed discoursal practices
• calculated intervention to shift discursive practices as part of the engineering of social change
• synthetic personalizaion: you personal to address mass audiences
• active material processes: produce, make, succeed, enable, embrace, all denoting an active and
self motivated enterprising employee
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• technologies of government:

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• policing is where you’re no longer in change of the discoursive tone and some other bdoy or
external group determines the right way to talk
• discourse technologists are experts that confirm and carry out the technologization of
discourse; the appointed spokespersons
• when its context free, it facilitates the colonization of local discourses by those discourses that
are culturally salient
• simulation is using techniques of other discourse practices in a discourse technique for their
effectivity
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