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 discourse function of the syntactic construction left dislocation in English has received significant attention. Prior research has identified at least three distinct form-function correlations underlying left dislocation. This paper examines left dislocation tokens from a corpus of spoken English recorded in South Philadelphia. From this emerges a fourth type of left dislocation not previo...

Nicholas Barbon’s A discourse of trade presents, in its construction, substance, and rhetoric, an early outline of a new science of the legislator for the new politics of commerce. Barbon drew together economic and political arguments, applying insights from the latter to a new understanding of the political potential of the former. His accounts of the aspect of infinity in economic growth, his...

As it is known, on the political scene the success of a speech can be measured by the degree in which the speaker is able to change attitudes, opinions, feelings and political beliefs in his auditorium. We suggest a range of analysis tools, all belonging to semiotics, from lexical-semantic, to syntactical and rhetorical, that integrated in the exploratory panoply of discursive weapons of a poli...

The Internet and online forums such as Reddit have become an increasingly popular medium for citizens to engage in political conversations. However, the online disinhibition effect resulting from the ability to use pseudonymous identities may manifest in the form of offensive speech, consequently making political discussions more aggressive and polarizing than they already are. Such environment...

We identify general trends in the (in)civility and complexity of political discussions occurring on Reddit between January 2007 and May 2017 – a period spanning both terms of Barack Obama’s presidency and the rst 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency. We then investigate four factors that are frequently hypothesized as having contributed to the declining quality of American political discourse ...

This paper presents a computational method, AnaDiP-2011, based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the interpretation of the political discourse in the print media. The application considers the 2009 presidential campaign in Romania. The concept behind this method is that the manner in which individuals speak and write, with the aim to deliver a certain image to the public, is a...