In his response to Szasz' Secular Humanism and Scientific Psychiatry, the author considers the use of rhetorical devices in Szasz' work, Szasz' avoidance of acknowledging psychiatry's scientific distinctions, and Szaszian libertarianism versus liberalism.

This short paper describes our ongoing work on representing the argument structure of a particular class of persuasive texts, and on reading experiments designed to investigate the effects of certain rhetorical devices, in particular the use of explicit argumentative connectives.

The paper discusses the development of rhetorical analyses of political addresses from classical antiquity to modern political communication. A specific genre, the ‘epideictic address’, is described in detail. It concerns addresses by representative persons. Most epideictic addresses turn out to be ‘hybrid’ texts because they combine an orientation towards (rhetorical-political) persuasion with...

The overall goal of this book is to specify the kinds of psychological mechanisms that support the comprehension of narrative. In this chapter, we lay the basis for examining these mechanisms in the rest of the book. An initial question for any approach has to be: what is narrative? As we shall see, there are many opinions about this, but it is possible to specify a relatively simple set of bas...