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This essay encourages communication researchers to understand better the rhetorical situation that challenges acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) educators working with out-of-school, African American adolescents in urban centers. Using Bitzer's (1968) schema and research from public health and allied fields, the authors identify those culturally based experiences and attitudes that rhetors (health educators) must integrate into lines of argument and appeals for AIDS prevention campaigns for this particularpool of perceivers. They illustrate the factors that impinge on channel selection, credibility and effectiveness of the rhetor, and message construction.

Based on analyses of seven pre-war intelligence documents, we demonstrate that estimates of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were laced with ambiguities and contradictions. Yet President Bush turned this contested intelligence into a heroic rhetoric of certainty, hence dragging the U.S. into war on the basis of lies. Based on a comprehensive critique of their post-9/11 speeches and testimonies, we offer a four-step rhetorical schema for analyzing how President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell constructed these lies. We thus offer readers both a critique of Bush administration deceptions and the critical rhetorical tools necessary to recognize and decode future governmental deception. Then, focusing on the post-war revelations offered by Joseph Wilson, which in turn prompted a vicious administration attack on Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, we analyze the labyrinthine cover-up the Bush administration has used to conceal its lies about Iraqi WMD.

This article assesses John R. Commons's adoption of Wesley N. Hohfeld's framework of jural opposites and correlatives in order to construct his transactional approach to the study of institutions. Hohfeld's influence on Commons, it is argued, was both positive and negative. On the one hand, Commons followed Hohfeld and recognized that such concepts as property and inheritance actually represent an aggregation of numerous types of legal relations. Hohfeld's schema provided a powerful rhetorical and analytical tool whereby these highly abstract conceptions could be reduced to a limited number of primary elements. Moreover, Hohfeld's schema appeared to be consistent with Commons's general methodological and psychological commitments. On the other hand, Commons's forging of the "transaction" as the elementary unit of economic analysis can be seen as an attempt to go beyond Hohfeld. Commons was in fact unsatisfied with Hohfeld's bilateral treatment of jural relations and with his neglect of the role played by state officials in enforcing transactions and, in so doing, in promoting specific individual interests as collective public policies.

Antinatalism, a relatively recent moral philosophical perspective and ideology that avows "it is better not to have ever existed," has spawned a new social movement with an active presence in social media. This study draws on the discourse historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis for offering a firm understanding as to how the collective identity of the Facebook antinatalist NSM is formed. The findings from the analysis of the situated interaction among the NSM's members demonstrate that collective identity is far from a knitty-gritty concept, but a dynamic schema that includes a plethora of micro-interactions. Individuals constantly negotiate its meaning in context, as they seek to streamline the antinatalist system of ideas with their lifeworld through a web of interlocking schemata, discursive and rhetorical strategies.

In this essay, we examine the core narratives and rhetorical techniques that extremist groups use to explain their worldview. We show that extremists in North America as well as throughout the world, regardless of their political or religious background, demonstrate great similarities in their construction and deployment of narratives. We also identify key features of what we call "the root war metaphor" that characterizes extremist narratives and apply a schema for analyzing "narrative trajectories" to suggest a relationship between these extremist narratives and acts of violence. What we can learn from shared narrative elements among extremist groups may help answer questions about the relationship of words to violence as well as speculate about how core narratives may be used to construct more compelling stories to promote social justice.

Legitimate authority is a widely touted yet rarely analyzed concept in discourse about war. In this essay, I articulate & analyze the schema of just war theory that has dominated philosophical discourse regarding war since the early medieval period. Although the requirements for a "just war" appear to exceed the simple proclamation by a legitimate authority, in fact, all of the other requirements are subject to the interpretation of the legitimate authority. In other words, just war theory reduces, in actual practice, to the requirement of legitimate authority. A consideration of the nature of contemporary warfare further suggests that just war theory is the vestigial idiom of a world that no longer exists. What remains today of just war theory is a dangerous rhetorical weapon, deployed by the leaders of both sides in every belligerent conflict. Adapted from the source document.

Legitimate authority is a widely touted yet rarely analyzed concept in discourse about war. In this essay, I articulate and analyze the schema of just war theory that has dominated philosophical discourse regarding war since the early medieval period. Although the requirements for a "just war" appear to exceed the simple proclamation by a legitimate authority, in fact, all of the other requirements are subject to the interpretation of the legitimate authority. In other words, just war theory reduces, in actual practice, to the requirement of legitimate authority. A consideration of the nature of contemporary warfare further suggests that just war theory is the vestigial idiom of a world that no longer exists. What remains today of just war theory is a dangerous rhetorical weapon, deployed by the leaders of both sides in every belligerent conflict.

Statements claiming that music represents a medium of potential political and cultural influence range from the Socratic dialogues in Plato's Republic to the recent ban and subsequent destruction of all Western musical instruments in Libya. Yet, in rhetorical studies, little progress has been made in the development of critical models for the analysis of music. Previous studies fail to examine adequately the nonlinguistic elements of music and tend to work largely from a message-effect model of communication. In contrast, I use an audience-centered, interpretive, ethnographic approach to the analysis of music, thereby observing the uses to which audiences put popular music forms. The study also employs a semiotic vocabulary, thereby allowing me to examine nonlinguistic signs in popular music. ; The critical concepts developed in this study are employed in an examination of reggae music and its role in the major subculture of Jamaica, Rastafari. Chapter II provides an historical contextualization of reggae music which offers a rhetorical definition of the genre based on audience expectations, uses, and interpretive schema. In Chapter III, an analysis of reggae music performed live identifies three significant codic elements in reggae music and then examines their typical structural interrelationship, offering a reconstruction of audience reading positions. In Chapter IV, the complexity of audience interpretations is addressed via analysis of reggae music as it is broadcast over Jamaican radio. ; In conclusion, I argue that audiences use music in different ways according to the situations in which it is presented and received. Furthermore, reggae music structures codic elements in much the same way linguistic messages are formed. Rhetorically, the composite message of reggae music makes claims on attitudes and behaviors which are characterized as appeals to resist the dominant ideology of Jamaica. The audience-centered and interpretive approach is better able to illuminate the rhetorical functions of popular music than are traditional methods of rhetorical criticism. ; Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-10, Section: A, page: 2856. ; Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Iowa, 1985.

This book sets out a framework for investigating audience responses to political discourse. It starts from the premise that audiences are active participants who bring their own background knowledge and political standpoint to the communicative event. To operationalise this perspective, the volume draws on concepts from classical rhetoric alongside contemporary research in cognitive stylistics and cognitive linguistics (including schema theory, Text World Theory, Cognitive Grammar, and mind-modelling, amongst others). It examines the role played by the speaker's identity, the arguments they make, and the emotions of the audience in the – often critical – reception of political text and talk, using a diversity of examples to illustrate this three-dimensional approach – from political speeches, interviews and newspaper articles, to more creative text-types such as politicised rap music, television satire and filmic drama. The result of this wide-ranging application is a holistic and systematic account of the rhetorical and ideological effects of political discourse in reception.

AbstractIn the hands of the South African government, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development operates as a powerful discourse, which functions both as an ideology and a rhetorical tool. The South African government's discourse is framed in a rigid modernization schema informed by an overoptimistic understanding of the power and valence of ICT for poverty reduction and broad-based development. Government invokes new ICT as an autonomous and largely unassailable force. Over the last decade, a narrow and deterministic model of ICT for poverty reduction has become hegemonic as an ideal as well as a set of development practices, a model which operates to exclude alternatives. The view of technology as an external, autonomous force exerting an influence on society presents a limited set of options: (1) uncritical embracing of technological change or (2) defensive adaptation to it. If we are to attempt a more objective, detached analysis of ICT for development, then it would seem appropriate to move beyond the linear "cause and effect" model of technological determinism and explore alternative perspectives on society and technology.

This article has two purposes. The first is to show how some of the central principles of classical Greek political theory became anachronistic as a result of massive transformations in the underlying structure of European society. These principles, it is argued, were originally dependent on an empirical premise that the polity is a "whole" encompassing individual "parts," or (stated differently) that the polity is identical with total society. This whole/part schematization of the polity seemed plausible in the ancient city since most sectors of polis life had political connotations or overtones. The same schema, however, became an archaism in modern Europe, chiefly because of the emphatic emergence of a distinction between state and society–one aspect of a more general increase in the structural differentiation of society. The second and closely related purpose is to explore the feasibility of a claim once advanced by Benjamin Constant: that the organizational transformations involved in the modernization of European society have created a novel rhetorical opportunity, the possibility of defending tyranny in the name of freedom and democracy.

This study is extracted from an MA thesis entitled "Strategies of Feminism in Halimah Yacob's Political Speeches: A Critical Discourse Analysis". The current study analyzes the feminist strategies of persuasion in political speech of Halimah Bint Yacob, the President of Singapore. The researcher uses Van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the structure of Critical Discourse Analysis of Halimah's political speeches to reveal the effectiveness of the positive self- representation upon Singaporeans in holding the success in their progressive life and to prove the efficiency of positive feminist strategies in changing and developing the Singaporeans' life to the best. The researcher utilizes the Socio-cognitive approach of Van Dijk in analyzing the speeches which includes three structures of analysis: macro-structure analysis, super-structure analysis and micro-structure analysis, the adopted approach is used to analyze the schema of the speeches depending upon the descriptive-qualitative and quantitative methodology to display the linguistic-structure of the language of the discourse via exploring the rhetorical devices that shows the power of feminist positive language in persuasion. The CDA shows the coherencies style via using repetition, speech acts, positive politeness, mother kindness and other feminist strategies that affect in persuasion.

My dissertation takes a new approach to the study of the American gothic, focusing on the rhetorical strategies by which authors chose to deploy the conventions of gothic writing. While many investigations into the American gothic presuppose a national subject, whose fears and desires can be located and diagnosed, I argue that such a subject is incoherent, and that the psychic cartography of fear in nineteenth-century America varied widely from North to South, master to slave, carpetbagger to scalawag, white supremacist to freedperson. That being the case, it makes sense to read the gothic not as an essential feature of the writing this dissertation examines, but as a set of tropes and conventions which circulated through a variety of texts depicting spectacles of horror or reaching out to readers' sense of fear. I call gothic episodes all chapters, scenes, and charged moments from literary works and broader print culture whose tropic or affective schema trace back to Gothic Revival texts. Significantly, these texts were well-known to nineteenth-century American readers, whose literate response to the appearance of gothic conventions was frequently expected by the writers deploying them. To supplement the critical narrative about the gothic that explains its power as originating in the psychologically repressed, I want to emphasize how writers rationally employed the mode to create calculated effects. I read these episodes as primarily persuasive rather than mimetic and thereby recover the rhetorical import of the gothic as understood by the authors who deployed its conventions. The following chapters examine how gothic episodes were put to work by abolitionists, proslavery advocates, freedmen, Klansmen, carpetbaggers, and advocates of African American civil rights, and I show how gothic effects were calculated to play upon diverse fears, prejudices, and desires for a variety of strategic purposes, from energizing supporters of political causes to manipulating the historical record of Reconstruction. Gothic episodes appear early on in a variety of American literary traditions, putting the so-called "literature of fear" to work in shaping the history and culture of the American nineteenth century.