Frederick Douglass, once a slave, was one of the great 19th century American orators and the most important African American voice of his era. This book traces the development of his rhetorical skills, discusses the effect of his oratory on his contemporaries, and analyzes the specific oratorical techniques he employed. The first part is a biographical sketch of Douglass's life, dealing with his years of slavery (1818-1837), his prewar years of freedom (1837-1861), the Civil War (1861-1865), and postwar years (1865-1895). Chesebrough emphasizes the centrality of oratory to Douglass's life, even during the years in slavery. The second part looks at his oratorical techniques and concludes with three speeches from different periods. Students and scholars of communications, U.S. history, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and African American studies will be interested in this book.

This book provides a historical review of the transformation of China’s image around the world since the 1978 Reform and Opening Up. Based on a synthetic model that the author constructs for evaluating national images, together with a historical review and quantitative analysis, it discusses the issues and challenges confronting China’s image around the world since the Opening Up.  To help rectify the situation that most of the research on China’s reform efforts focuses on hard power (esp. economic power), this book, which mainly focuses on China’s soft power, reviews and assesses its global image from the three perspectives of politics, economy and culture. In the process, it sheds valuable new light on the presentation of China’s image and the world’s perceptions of China.

This book fills a significant gap in the field by addressing the topic of absence in discourse. It presents a range of proposals as to how we can identify and analyse what is absent, and promotes the empirical study of absence and silence in discourse. The authors argue that these phenomena should hold a more central position in the field of discourse, and discuss these two topics at length in this innovative edited collection. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis.

Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a 'natural' body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West's desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women's bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West's mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West's sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is 'other' - thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is.

Pullum examines the rhetorical genre of 20th-century American faith healing. He first analyzes respectively the rhetoric of Aimee Semple McPherson, William Branham, Oral Roberts, Asa Alonzo Allen, Ernest Angley, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Benny Hinn--the most prominent American faith healers of this century. For each, he discusses their background, the nature of the audiences to whom they preached, and why they were so successful. Pullum concludes by drawing together the major rhetorical features of faith-healing discourse.

Pullum shows that faith-healing discourse follows the strategy of offering hope to the hopeless, giving God the glory, articulating humble beginnings, offering testimony of past personal afflictions overcome, and drawing on scripture to bolster their claims. This discourse is often presented in dynamic fashion, making it not only credible, but entertaining as well. After elucidating the rhetorical patterns of faith healers, Pullum evaluates claims of the miraculous in light of the standard that they set for themselves. In other words, miracles as presented by faith healers are juxtaposed to the types one reads about in the Bible. Pullum also attempts to account for why people claim miraculous cures in spite of the fact that nothing miraculous has occurred in the services of faith healers.

This book is the first to formulate an ideology of emancipation for women in Morocco. Beginning with constructs of the body, femininity and masculinity, it analyzes the central role played by the sociopolitical writing of sexuality in creating gender hierarchy. The author focuses on Morocco, while drawing parallels with Hollywood cinema, one of the great producers of femininity and masculinity, and conducts an exhaustive examination of constructs of femininity and masculinity in language, social practices, cultural productions and legal texts. The objectives of this project are tripartite: it exposes the dynamics that devalue women's humanity; it charts the schemas of their sexual, economic and sociopolitical exploitation; and it advances concrete solutions for re-establishing women's human dignity.

This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.

This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.

When researchers in computer-mediated communications discuss digital textuality, they rarely venture beyond the now commonplace notion that computer textuality embodies contemporary post-structuralist theories. Written for students and faculty of contemporary literature and composition theories, this book is the first to move from general to specific considerations. Advancing from general considerations of how computers are changing literacy, Digital Fictions moves on to a specific consideration of how computers are altering one particular set of literature practices: reading and writing fiction. Suffused through the sensibility of a creative writer, this book includes an historical overview of writing stories on computers. In addition, Sloane conducts interviews with the makers of hypertext fictions (including Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce, and Carolyn Guyer) and offers close reading of digital fictions. Making careful analyses of the meaning-making activities of both readers and writers of this emerging genre, this work is embedded in a perspective both feminist and semiotic. Digital Fictions explores and distinguishes among four distinct iterations of text-based digital fictions; text adventures, Carnegie Mellon University Oz Project, hypertext fictions, and MUDs. Ultimately, Sloane revises the rhetorical triangle and proposes a new rhetorical theory, one that attends to the materials, processes, and locations of stories told on-line.

This is the first volume to present individual chapters on the full range of developmental and acquired pragmatic disorders in children and adults. In chapters that are accessible to students and researchers as well as clinicians, this volume introduces the reader to the different types of pragmatic disorders found in clinical populations as diverse as autism spectrum disorder, traumatic brain injury and right hemisphere language disorder. The volume also moves beyond these well-established populations to include conditions such as congenital visual impairment and non-Alzheimer dementias, in which there are also pragmatic impairments. Through the use of conversational and linguistic data, the reader can see how pragmatic disorders impact on the communication skills of the clients who have them. The assessment and treatment of pragmatic disorders are examined, and chapters also address recent developments in the neuroanatomical and cognitive bases of these disorders.

The text of the Qur'an appears to many to be desperately muddled and lacking any coherence. The Composition of the Qur'an provides a systematic presentation of the writing processes (or rhetoric) and argues that there is indeed a coherence to the Qur'anic text. Michel Cuypers shows that the ancient Semitic texts, of which the Qur'an is a part, do not obey the Greek rhetoric and that their basic principle is therefore not progressive linearity, but symmetry which can take several forms, following precise rules. He argues that the knowledge of this rhetorical code allows for a radically new analysis of the structure and rhetoric of the Qur'an. Using copious amounts of examples from the text, The Composition of the Qur'an provides a new theoretical synthesis of Qur'anic rhetoric as well as a methodology for their application in further exegesis. A landmark publication in the field of Qur'anic Studies, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Islamic Studies, Religious Studies and Arabic Studies.

With contributions by sixteen scholars from such diverse fields as communication, linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, and sociology of sciences, Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse continues the contemporary discussion about the origin and nature of scientific discourse and its function in today's society. Essays document the increasing importance of rhetorical expertise in scientific discourse, shed new light into the history and language of science, and offer pedagogical guidance for teachers of scientific writing. Readers may also discover new topics for scholarly research in scientific discourse. Gay and Ted Gragson, for instance, show how technological advances may increase the rhetorical complexity of the grant proposal process, while J. Harrison Carpenter reveals the rhetorical power of the scientific report. In a related study, Cynthia Haller shows how scientific claims change as they mover from the scientific to the public arena. Dwight Atkinson gives empiricists a new methodology by integrating rhetorical analysis with sociolinguistic methodology. Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Dan Ding describe the evolution of scientific metaphor and passive voice, respectively. Ramon Plo Alastrue, Carmen Ramon Plo Alastrue-Llantada, and Rosemary Horowitz offer advice for teachers of scientific writing, while Steven Darian explores the intricacies and argumentative power of scientific classification schemas. In turn, Philippa Benson gives editorial advice to writers of scientific texts. Gender issues in scientific writing are addressed by Christine Skolnik and Mary Rosner. Trevor Pinch and Charles Alan Taylor put the cold fusion controversy of 1989 in critical perspective.

This book collects twenty-five of the author's essays, each of which addresses a descriptive or a foundational issue that arises at the interface between linguistic semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and the philosophy of language, on the other. Arranged into three interconnected parts (I. Matters of Meaning and Truth; II. Matters of Meaning and Force; III. Knowledge Matters), the essays suggest that some key topics in the above-mentioned fields have often been approached in ways that considerably underestimate their empirical or conceptual complexity, and attempt to delineate perspectives from which, and conditions under which, an improved understanding of those topics could be sought. The book will be of interest to linguists working in semantics and pragmatics, and to philosophers working in the philosophy of language and in epistemology.

This collection introduces and develops Lacanian thought concerning the relations among language, subjectivity, and society. Lacanian Theory of Discourse provides an account of how language both interacts with and constitutes structures of subjectivity, producing specific attitudes and behaviors as well as significant social effects.

Academic writing on environmental communication proliferated in the 1990's. A few of us had been calling for such work and making initial investigations throughout the 1980's, but the momentum in the field built slowly. Spurred by coverage in the mass media, academic publishers finally caught the wave of interest. In this exciting new volume, the editors demonstrate more fully than ever before how environmental rhetoric and technical communication go hand in hand. The key link that they and their distinguished group of contributors have discovered is the ancient concern of communication scholars with public deliberation. Environmental issues present technical communicators with some of their greatest challenges, above all, how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making. The editors encourage us to accept the challenge of contributing to environmentally conscious decision making by integrating technical knowledge and human values. For technical communicators who accept the challenge of working toward solutions by opening access to crucial information and by engaging in critical thinking on ecological issues, the research and theory offered in this volume provide a strong foundation for future practice.

Fuery explores the relationship between post-structuralism and absence. In order to understand the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan (and Freud), the deconstructionalist methodology of Derrida, Foucault's studies of systems of thought, and Kristeva's socio-cultural and psychoanalytic interests, Fuery believes it is necessary to take into consideration the function and operation of absence. He shows how post-structuralist theory can be seen as a system of studies of subjectivity in terms of absence, and how desire is based almost entirely on the precondition of absence. The study is divided into sections on subjectivity. desire, and meaning, with the final section working toward a hermeneutics and semiotics of absence.

This book presents reflections on the relationship between narratives and argumentative discourse. It focuses on their functional and structural similarities or dissimilarities, and offers diverse perspectives and conceptual tools for analyzing the narratives' potential power for justification, explanation and persuasion. Divided into two sections, the first Part, under the title "Narratives as Sources of Knowledge and Argument", includes five chapters addressing rather general, theoretical and characteristically philosophical issues related to the argumentative analysis and understanding of narratives. We may perceive here how scholars in Argumentation Theory have recently approached certain topics that have a close connection with mainstream discussions in epistemology and the cognitive sciences about the justificatory potential of narratives. The second Part, entitled "Argumentative Narratives in Context", brings us six more chapters that concentrate on either particular functions played by argumentatively-oriented narratives or particular practices that may benefit from the use of special kinds of narratives. Here the focus is either on the detailed analysis of contextualized examples of narratives with argumentative qualities or on the careful understanding of the particular demands of certain well-defined situated activities, as diverse as scientific theorizing or war policing, that may be satisfied by certain uses of narrative discourse.

This accessible introduction to multimodality illuminates the potential of multimodal research for understanding the ways in which people communicate. Readers will become familiar with the key concepts and methods in various domains while learning how to engage critically with the notion of multimodality. The book challenges widely held assumptions about language and presents the practical steps involved in setting up a multimodal study, including: formulating research questions collecting research materials assessing and developing methods of transcription considering the ethical dimensions of multimodal research. A self-study guide is also included, designed as an optional stand-alone resource or as the basis for a short course. With a wide range of examples, clear practical support and a glossary of terms, Introducing Multimodality is an ideal reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students in multimodality, semiotics, applied linguistics and media and communication studies. Online materials, including colour images and more links to relevant resources, are available on the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/jewitt and the Routledge Language and Communication Portal.

Although Portuguese is one of the main world languages and researchers have been working on Portuguese electronic text collections for decades (e.g. Kelly, 1970; Biderman, 1978; Bacelar do Nascimento et al., 1984; see Berber Sardinha, 2005), this is the first volume in English that encapsulates the exciting and cutting-edge corpus linguistic work being done with Portuguese language corpora on different continents. The book includes chapters by leading corpus linguists dealing with Portuguese corpora across the world, and their contributions explore various methods and how they are applicable to a wide range of language issues. The book is divided into six sections, each covering a key issue in Corpus Linguistics: lexis and grammar, lexicography, language teaching and terminology, translation, corpus building and sharing, and parsing and annotation. Together these sections present the reader with a broad picture of the field.

The essays and commentaries presented here are intended to strike a balance between the disciplines to which the Bar-Hillel Colloquium (formerly the Israel Colloquium) is dedicated. The historical and sociological vantage point is addressed in Krammick's and Mali's treatment of Priestley, in Vicker's and Feldhay's studies of the Renaissance occult and in Warnke's and Barasch's work on the imagination. From a philosophical angle several concepts, all material to the methodology of science, are taken up: rule following, by Smart and Margalit; analysis, by Ackerman, explanation, by Taylor; and the role of mathematics in physics, by Levy-Leblond and Pitowsky. In addition, the volume contains the proceedings of two symposia dedicated to two towering scientific figures: one celebrates Bohr's centennial, and the other examines the "other" Newton. The book should appeal to people whose interest or research is in the fields of philosophy, sociology and history of science, technology and medicine, as well as those interested in science education.

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter's responsibility from the original speaker's responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on "what is said", whether this is a minimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

This book examines linguistic expressions of emotion in intensional contexts and offers a formally elegant account of the relationship between language and emotion. The author presents a compelling case for the view that there exist, contrary to popular belief, logical universals at the intersection of language and emotive content. This book shows that emotive structures in the mind that are widely assumed to be not only subjectively or socio-culturally variable but also irrelevant to a general theory of cognition offer an unusually suitable ground for a formal theory of emotive representations, allowing for surprising logical and cognitive consequences for a theory of cognition. Challenging mainstream assumptions in cognitive science and in linguistics, this book will appeal to linguists, philosophers of the mind, linguistic anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists of all persuasions.