Rhetoric
Rhetoric (/ˈrɛtərɪk/) is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences.[1] Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.
For the work by Aristotle, see Rhetoric (Aristotle).
Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion", and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he called it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics".[2] Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric, or phases of developing a persuasive speech, were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians, statesmen, and poets.[3][note 1]
Comparative rhetoric[edit]
Comparative rhetoric is a practice and methodology that developed in the late twentieth century to broaden the study of rhetoric beyond the dominant rhetorical tradition that has been constructed and shaped in western Europe and the U.S.[140][141] As a research practice, comparative rhetoric studies past and present cultures across the globe to reveal diversity in the uses of rhetoric and to uncover rhetorical perspectives, practices, and traditions that have been historically underrepresented or dismissed.[140][142][143] As a methodology, comparative rhetoric constructs a culture's rhetorical perspectives, practices, and traditions on their own terms, in their own contexts, as opposed to using European or American theories, terminology, or framing.[140]
Comparative rhetoric is comparative in that it illuminates how rhetorical traditions relate to one another, while seeking to avoid binary depictions or value judgments.[140] This can reveal issues of power within and between cultures as well as new or under-recognized ways of thinking, doing, and being that challenge or enrich the dominant Euro-American tradition and provide a fuller account of rhetorical studies.[144]
Robert T. Oliver is credited as the first scholar who recognized the need to study non-Western rhetorics in his 1971 publication Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China.[142][145] George A. Kennedy has been credited for the first cross-cultural overview of rhetoric in his 1998 publication Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-cultural Introduction.[145] Though Oliver's and Kennedy's works contributed to the birth of comparative rhetoric, given the newness of the field, they both used Euro-American terms and theories to interpret non-Euro-American cultures' practices.[145][146]
LuMing Mao, Xing Lu, Mary Garrett, Arabella Lyon, Bo Wang, Hui Wu, and Keith Lloyd have published extensively on comparative rhetoric, helping to shape and define the field.[145] In 2013, LuMing Mao edited a special issue on comparative rhetoric in Rhetoric Society Quarterly,[147] focusing on comparative methodologies in the age of globalization. In 2015, LuMing Mao and Bo Wang coedited a symposium[148] featuring position essays by a group of leading scholars in the field. In their introduction, Mao and Wang emphasize the fluid and cross-cultural nature of rhetoric, "Rhetorical knowledge, like any other knowledge, is heterogeneous, multidimentional, and always in the process of being created."[148]: 241 The symposium includes "A Manifesto: The What and How of Comparative Rhetoric", demonstrating the first collective effort to identify and articulate comparative rhetoric's definition, goals, and methodologies.[143] The tenets of this manifesto are engaged with in many later works that study or utilize comparative rhetoric.[145]
Automatic detection of rhetorical figures[edit]
As natural language processing has developed, so has interest in automatically detecting rhetorical figures. The major focus has been to detect specific figures, such as chiasmus, epanaphora, and epiphora[149] using classifiers trained with labeled data. A major shortcoming to achieving high accuracy with these systems is the shortage of labeled data for these tasks, but with recent advances in language modeling, such as few-shot learning, it may be possible to detect more rhetorical figures with less data.[150]
