Rhetoric, Language and Persuasion Quiz

• Study notes from class 1, January 7th, 2025.

Theories: Definitions and Distinctions

• Theory: contemplation, spectacle, mental conception
• Fact: something known to be true or to exist
• Opinion: belief based on grounds short of proof; a view held as probable, what one thinks about something
• Theory: "A way of seeing, of understanding, of planning" (Hyman, 1975)
• Theory: A generalization, relating a new situation to an old one in order to discern patterns and figure out what is likely to happen

Evaluating Theories: 5 Criteria

• Scope: appropriate
• Testability: able to check
• Parsimony: simplest definition is the most useful/accurate
• Utility: is the theory useful
• Heurism: does the theory allow others to work off of it and move/develop further

Three Levels of Study in Communication Studies

• Language: micro level (messages, talk, text)
• Media: meso level (press, radio, social media)
• Culture: macro level (class, regional, national)
• Plausible deniability, dog whistles - two different meanings
• Public democracy - advertising to win over majority

Sophocles (497-405 BCE)

• language, and thought like the wind
• And the feelings that make the town
• Man has taught himself, and shelter against the cold
• Regue from the rain

Language Theories

• A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many architects in the construction of her cells
• What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this: the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality
• Reflective: language is a system for naming objects, things, etc. (nomenclature)
• Intentional: what author/speaker intends
• Constructional: language is social, and it constructs reality
• Reality is NOT made up
• Word choices, structures, connotations, etc. create a perception of object/etc.
• "Our perception" = "our reality"
• Examples: police officer chatted with the teenager, the police officer spoke to the teenager, and the police officer interrogated the teenager.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

• Theorist, novelist & writer
• 1958 - culture & society
• 1961 - The long revolution
• 1962, 1966 - communications
• 1976 - keywords
• 1983 - keywords
• 1974 - television: technology & cultural form
• Marxism & literature

Primary Resources of Communication

• Human body necessary (voice, hands)
• Non-human objects & forces are adapted & shaped by humans for communication

Materiality of Language

• To understand the materiality of language, distinction is necessary between spoken words and written notations
• Spoken words are a process of human activity using only immediate, constitutive, physical resources
• Written words, with their continuing but not necessarily direct relation to speech, are a form of material production, adapting non-human resources to a human end

Keywords = Historical Semantics

• The study of reference, meaning, or truth
• Formal semantics: senses, reference, implication, logical form
• Lexical semantics: word choices, relations
• Historical semantics: change over time & place

Four keywords - Common

• Communication
• Commune
• Communism
• Community
• Language = commons

Mass communications

• Thought of as 'in too functional and too secondary a way'

• Large crowds & audiences before “mass comm'ns' but audiences are now mostly dispersed and small

• there are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses

• Study notes from Class 2 - January 14th 2025

Language, Metaphor & Rhetoric

• Winslow and the language of inequality
• Poverty is not an unfortunate accident “If you work hard you will get ahead” - most people have inherited wealth
• Coherent account of inequality as an ideological process
• Assumed capitalism will inevitably generate arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that pose radical threats to the perception of economic justice
• Examples of massive failures, communist regimes of USSR, eastern Europe and Cuba
• Cutting global poverty from 50% to 20% between 1980 and 2016
• Half of that was China through state-led and directed capitalism
• It is misguided to assume empirical methods can explain economic arrangement
• Not work ethic or perseverance but what matters most is who your parents are
• Empirical methods reveal the language we choose to explain why some are rich and poor they can't explain why
• People don't do “well when confronted with contradictions, conundrums, and paradoxes. We desire order, coherence, and consistency"
• Ideology = a means to order a disorderly world to better understand one's place in the world and to explain to oneself what is going on
• % of Canadian households are a few paychecks away from homelessness

Meme

• I need someone to explain to me why its always
• Ideological adherence is a continuous process, always prone to failure and contradiction
• Ideology is best understood as a mechanism through which alternatives are foreclosed, not as a method of brainwashing; it is most visible when language and reality diverge.
• Ideology in practice is a political language that can dictate decisions, manufacture consent, influence public belief and behavior, and indicate the groups upon which the social order remains stable by generating consent to its parameters through the production and distribution of language

Communication Theory

• Art of persuasive or impressive speaking or writing
• Language designed to persuade or impress (often with the implication of insincerity or exaggeration)
• Human communication relies on an assumption of sincerity without which successful engagement in the most basic communicative act is impossible
• Rhetorical analysis: used to uncover probable truth in areas where there is no certainty

Three Speech Situations - Three Types of Speech

• Forensic for judicial, refers to the past, aims to determine guilt or innocence
• Deliberative, refers to the future, aims to determine the best course of action
• Epideictic, refers to the present, involves praise or blame, often at public events (festivals, funerals, etc.)

Phases of Working on a Speech or Writing

• Inventio (invention): address where arguments come from, gathering material
• Dispositio (arrangement): logic, organization of the work, order of speech - ‘narrative’
• Elocutio (style): relationship between form and content, language used
• Memoria (memory): access a speaker has to the content of speech, extemporaneously
• Actio (delivery): presenting speech to the audience

Three Means of Persuasion

• Ethos: emotional appeals based on the speaker's character (credibility)

• Pathos: appeals to power (fear vs love)

• Logos: words, speech, reasoning (logic)

• Metaphor

• Study notes from Class 3 - January 21st 2025

Structuralism, Semiotics, and Myths

• Structuralism
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
• Father of modern linguistics
• Ancient & Indo-European languages
• U of Geneva (1892-1913)
• 1916 Course in General Linguistics (published by his students)
• Rejects previous theories of the language - reflectionist
• Structural linguistics - structuralism

Language and Parole

• Looks for laws, structures & conventions that govern how people communicate in society
• Language: universal underlying structure that enables a linguistic communication system
• Langue: system of rules and conventions
• Parole: actual utterances
• Synchronic: occurs at a particular time
• Diachronic: occurs over time

Signs

• Sign: signifier + signified
• Signifier: sound or image
• Signified: concept
• Signifier & signified: abstract mental entities

Linguistic Signs - 4 Characteristics

• Arbitrary nature of the sign: based on convention, fixed by rule
• Linear nature of signifier: sequentially structured via time or space
• Immutability: appears fixed as if chosen by language, inherent conservatism of language
• Mutability: because of its arbitrariness
• Only collectives can change language although mostly not intentional
• More or less rapid change of linguistic signs
• Principle of change is based upon the principle of continuity

Heuristics

• Structuralist anthropology
• Society is structured around binary oppositions
• Uncover meanings in any society by uncovering patterns & categories of oppositions
• Binary oppositions are deep underlying structures spoken unconsciously by members of society, e.g., human/non-human, nature/culture
• Major influence on film studies

Semiotics (aka Semiology)

• The study of signs (Greek)
• Science of communication and sign systems of the ways people understand phenomena and organize them mentally, and the ways in which they devise means for transmitting that understanding and for sharing it with others (Marcel Danesi, 1946)
• Language is a system of signs
• Langage = langue + parole
• Language is a form, not substance
• Langue = rules & conventions
• Necessary to study the system of rules and constraints that make the generation of meanings possible
• Parole = utterance or speech, actual use & examples of language in use

Signs

• Icon: signifies through likeness
• Iconic: resembles what it represents
• Index: signifies through physical connection
• Indexical: direct link, logical connection, association
• Symbol: signifies through arbitrary social connection
• Symbolic: arbitrary link or by convention
• Linguistic sign is arbitrary
• Difference or distinction from other signs
• The word cat represented cat
• Because it is not a mat, rat, rat, car, cot, cut, or can or any other three letter word in the English language
• Sign = signifier (verbal or visual vehicle) /signified (mental concept)

Codes

• Meanings of specific signs are only understood in relation to each other
• Codes organize the particular meanings of signs in a particular arrangement or connect, e.g., traffic lights, weddings, funerals
• Paradigm/System
• Paradigm: choice/section (vertical)
• Syntagm: sequence/combination (horizontal)
• Meaning: always the result of the interplay of relationships of selection of combination made possible by the underlying structure

Mythology

• Rolan Barthes (1915-1980)
• Classical letters, philosophy, grammar, lexicology, sociology
• ill health, TB
• Traveled widely
• Popular papers/magazines
• Professor college de France
• Structuralism & semiotics to post-structuralism
• Roland Barthes (1957) - Myth Today
• Mythologies
• 54 mini-essays for magazine
• Analyzing French popular culture, e.g., wrestling, steak and chips, wine and milk, toys, new Citroen

Mythology = Semiology + Ideology

• Semiology: Science of forms
• Ideology: historical science
• Barthes myths
• NOT the same as ancient Greek or Roman myths
• Can only be based on history, not eternal
• Pictures, objects, not just words, become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful
• Myth is form, not content
• Myth is not defined by the object of its message but conveys the message.
• Myth is a type of speech chosen by history; it cannot possibly evolve from the nature of things
• Form, not content - a mode of signification
• Myth arises out of the 2nd or 3rd order of signification

Order of Signification = Denotation

• Literal meaning

• Use of language to mean what it says

• Obvious meaning of the sign

• Order of signification = connotation

• Connotes or connotes

• Associations proc used by the first or denotative order of signification

• Produces associate, expressive or evaluative meanings

• Myth = dominant ideology?

• A type of speech about social realities which supports ideology by taking these realities outside the arena of political debate

• Myth constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things; they lose the memory that they were once made

• Don't look up online; go into slides for the right definition

• Midterm Preparation

• 5 short answers out of 8; requires innovative and creative thinking, summarizing readings while addressing the writer’s argument, and identifying key points.

• Multiple choice questions, focusing on slide definitions.

• February 4th, 2025 - Commodification and Political Economy

‘Keynesianism’ vs ‘Neoliberalism’ USA: 1947-2007

• ‘Golden Age’ of Capitalism: Keynesian policies = save capitalism via government intervention in economy
• ‘Neoliberal’ Capitalism: State intervention into economy to privatize public goods/services à 'socialize risks & costs, AND privatize profits'

Marx - Capital

• 'Born of the advent of money in the 16th century, capital is the amount of wealth that is used in making profits; the variable excess pulled out of labour power produces surplus value.
• “Dead Labour” - refers to worker's productivity
• Variable Capital e.g. Human labour
• Constant Capital e.g. raw materials & equipment

Mode of Production: Commodity

• Use Value & Exchange Value
• "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist production prevails presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities', its unit being a single commodity

Commodity

• 'A thing can be a use-value, without having value... whenever its utility to man is not due to labout....air, virgin soil, natural meadows...." “acquired exchange value”
• 'A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity

Use Value

• 'The utility of a thing makes it a use value.... Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption'

Exchange Value

• a relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort’ an equation of commensurability

Socially Necessary Labor Time

• 'A key to exchange value, the value that inheres in the commodity of the abstract labor used to produce it. A way of describing average levels of labour productivity in relation to social needs embodied in commodities'.

Two Kinds of Commodity

• Money - Historically à a commodity whose value determined by ‘average socially necessary labour time' expended in production
• Labor power - exchange relation of labour-power commodity = fundamental relation of capitalist mode of prod'n - capitalist buys your time (i.e. ability to labour), in exchange the 'fruits' of your labour belong to the capitalist

Surplus Value

• What is in excess of labour cost that is available for appropriation /exploitation and is the basis for capital accumulation: profit'
• Absolute Surplus Value
• 'the extension of the work day for the same wage'
• Relative Surplus Value
• 'the extension of productivity by extracting more labor out of a given unit of labor by means of measuring and monitoring systems

Test your knowledge of language, rhetoric, and persuasion. Questions cover ideology, Saussure's linguistics, rhetorical analysis, speech types, persuasive techniques, and speech preparation.