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Volume 13, Issue 3, 2024
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Superquestions and some ways to answer them
Author(s): Giulia D’Agostino, Ella Schad, Eimear Maguire, Costanza Lucchini, Andrea Rocci and Chris Reedpp.: 319–372 (54)More LessAbstractEarnings Conference Calls, in which corporate management are quizzed by investment analysts, are a particularly rich source of a phenomenon of question-asking that, though less prevalent, also occurs in many other genres of discourse. When a participant in a dialogue is allowed to ask more than one question consecutively — particularly in order to extend or refine or recast — we see that respondents often react by answering either one or more of the individual questions, or by answering a question that was never actually asked, but which is related to the explicit questions and to other content introduced in the turn. We call this overarching implicit question a superquestion, and explore how they can be formed, how they can be answered, how they trigger argumentation, and, indeed, how they can be dodged.
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A definite must read
Author(s): Bart Garssen and Iva Svačinovápp.: 373–399 (27)More LessAbstractThe present study aims at clarifying how in literary reviews value judgements about novels are justified. For this purpose we first give an overall description of the place of literary reviews in journalism. Then, we characterize literary reviews as an argumentative activity type. Next, we turn to the argumentative pattern prototypical of literary reviews. To illustrate our account of literary reviews, we present an exemplary analysis of a particular review. In so doing we propose a tool for the empirical study of literary reviews.
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Fool them before they fool you
Author(s): Hristo Valchev, Dale Hample and Jessica M. Hamplepp.: 400–427 (28)More LessAbstractBulgarian people have a long history and an enduring national identity, significantly defined by their continuing allegiance to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Here we investigate how Bulgarians understand the prospect of interpersonal argument. Our instruments assess Bulgarians’ arguing motivations, their understandings of the practice of arguing face to face, their emotional reactions to interpersonal disagreement, their tolerance of status inequalities in society, and their willingness to argue at work. We have data from 287 Bulgarians (39% male, 61% female), having an average age of 37 years. We uncovered very few differences between men and women. We found older Bulgarians less eager to argue in typical social situations, though they were not hesitant to argue with their superiors at work. They were more polite and cooperative when they did argue. Bulgarians who were most comfortable with status inequities in society were reluctant to argue with their superiors, were noticeably willing to produce ad hominem arguments, and generally had an aggressive impolite profile of arguing orientations. Poland and Ukraine are natural comparisons because of their shared political histories in the last several generations. We also do a comparison with the U.S., as a general standard of comparison because our theories and measures originated in the U.S.
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Presence-prominence effect in multimodal eco-discourse
Author(s): Fengju Dai and Chengyu Liupp.: 428–453 (26)More LessAbstractThe insufficient ecological awareness among the public is widely acknowledged as the fundamental cause of ecological crises. To address this issue, the present study incorporates the rhetorical concept of presence with the social psychological notion of prominence effect. The aim is to explore how ecological awareness is conveyed in multimodal discourse and then how it is transmitted to the audience through the presence of multimodal resources, using the ecological public service advertisement “BLUE” as a case study. To examine the prominence effect, interviews were conducted with 12 participants to investigate the influence of the prominent elements on the audience’s understandings. The findings reveal that the ecological awareness conveyed by multimodal resources in the selected material is “Green travel”. To promote this ecological awareness, various resources in the visual, auditory, and textual modalities, such as image displays, background colors, participants’ expressions, and gestures, are employed to achieve “presence”. These prominent elements, in turn, impact the audience’s understanding and reception of the conveyed ecological awareness. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the audience’s ecological awareness influences the prominence effect of elements designed for presence in the discourse, thereby impacting audiences’ understanding and response towards the eco-discourse, and for optimal impact, the elements emphasized in the presence of the discourse should align with the prominent elements to captivate the audience’s attention. Based on the analysis, a multidimensional model of presence-prominent effect of multimodal ecological discourse reception is proposed, and some implications for effective development of ecological awareness is then discussed.
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Arguing with oneself
Author(s): Marta Zampa and Daniel Perrin
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