Search results for "Rhetoric"

Il piacere della persuasione. Sull’intreccio tra piacere e conoscenza nella Retorica di Aristotele

2015

L’articolo ha per argomento un principio basilare della Retorica di Aristotele: un discorso sarà tanto più persuasivo quanto più riuscirà a realizzare nell’ascoltatore un apprendimento veloce e piacevole. L’idea su cui tale principio si fonda è che il coinvolgimento necessario per la realizzazione della persuasione deve essere nello stesso tempo emotivo e cognitivo. A partire dalle numerose esemplificazioni fornite dallo stesso Aristotele, l’articolo intende mostrare che si tratta di un principio “trasversale”, ovvero non limitato ad un solo aspetto del discorso ma attivo a tutti i livelli: logico-argomentativo, lessicale e sintattico. È proprio grazie a questa trasversalità che esso può es…

Are Humans Poor at Arguing? From the ‘Argumentative Theory of Reasoning’ back to a Rhetorical Theory of Argumentation

2018

Starting from Sperber and Mercier’s theory (2011) on the relationship between reasoning and arguing, we will try to rethink the link between rhetoric and argumentation. Using Aristotelian rhetoric as a theoretical framework, we will focus on two related features: 1) the nature and the role of argumentation inferences in classical models of rhetoric; 2) the role of normativity in assessing a naturalistic description of what we make when we argue.

Rhetorical deliberation. A sustainable normativism from a Gorgianic-Aristotelian perspective

2018

Starting from the discursive turn that has characterized democracy since the 80s of the last century, our article tries to outline a form of sustainable normativism. To do this, we use a theoretical framework derived from ancient Greek rhetoric and in particular from the reflection of Gorgias and Aristotle. In our perspective, on the one hand, the Gorgianic view is a useful reminder of the role that the pursuit of power and the possibility of conflict unavoidably play in the form of argumentation specific to the public sphere, that is, deliberation. On the other hand, Aristotle, thanks to his emphasis on the link between logos and desire and his analysis of truth available in deliberative c…

Barack Obama’s South Carolina’s speech. RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication, 27 (2008), pp. 87-122.

2008

Prophecy and Apocalypse among the Oromo-Borana: The Power of Chiasmus

2018

This chapter bridges the rhetoric culture and anticipation theoretical domains for reinterpreting the prophetic and apocalyptic texts on the Oromo-Borana (Ethiopia). The analysis qualifies prophecy as a practice of anticipation, a rational and collective exercise of criticism to current social trends, facilitated by creative individuals that make full use of the cognitive potential of chiasmus and other rhetorical devises.

Radicalisation of the British aristocracy : aristocratic decline, inter-war fascism and reactionary rhetoric

2008

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the relationship between the decline of British aristocracy and British inter-war fascism. It is argued that there was a link between the decline of aristocratic influence, achieved largely by political and legislative means, and the subsequent radicalisation of the aristocracy. Furthermore, the history and development of British fascism is examined especially in the aristocratic context, and the pre-war radical right groups are placed in the same continuum as the later actual fascist parties. The aristocratic rhetorical opposition to proposed reforms aimed at the democratisation of British politics is studied in the context of Albert Hirschman'…

"That in the opinion of this House" : The parliamentary culture of debate in the nineteenth-century Cambridge and Oxford Union Societies

2012

Contesting Category Salience: A study of the perceptions of the sides involved in the Persian Gulf War

2001

AbstractPrevious studies of political rhetoric in general, and the rhetoric surrounding the Gulf war in particular, have suggested that social categories are not defined by perceptual features of context, but rather rhetorically constructed and contested for the purposes of mass mobilisation. Thus western leaders portrayed the conflict as ‘Civilisation against Saddam Hussein’ in order to maximise the pro-war constituency, while leaders of the western anti-war movements portrayed it in terms of ‘Western leaders against ordinary (Iraqi) people’ in order to minimise the pro-war constituency. However these studies focus exclusively on leaders and fail to show whether ordinary people differ in t…

From Metaphors to Simulations to Idioms: Supporting the Conceptualisation Process

2004

The concept of metaphor has been used in UI design in a loose manner. There is a need to conceptually separate it from related concepts to restore the power it used to have in rhetoric. It is also important to understand the life cycle of metaphor, how it changes over time in the conceptualisation process. This is especially topical in ubiquitous computing, in which entirely new concepts and interaction styles are introduced. In this paper, we describe the use of metaphors and related concepts in theory and apply the approach in a mobile application.

Languages with mismatches

2007

AbstractIn this paper we study some combinatorial properties of a class of languages that represent sets of words occurring in a text S up to some errors. More precisely, we consider sets of words that occur in a text S with k mismatches in any window of size r. The study of this class of languages mainly focuses both on a parameter, called repetition index, and on the set of the minimal forbidden words of the language of factors of S with errors. The repetition index of a string S is defined as the smallest integer such that all strings of this length occur at most in a unique position of the text S up to errors. We prove that there is a strong relation between the repetition index of S an…