Rhetorical counteraction in Kenneth Burke's <i>A Rhetoric of Motives</i> and <i>The War of Words</i>

Jensen, Kyle

doi:10.1080/00335630.2018.1519254

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Critiquing previous literature on Burke's pentad: New research hypothesis and questions Burke (1945Burke ( /1969 xv) has technically dubbed the five-term dramatistic model, outlined in the introduction above (Section 1), as "pentad," or the "pentad of key terms," which is more generally known to be a grammar of motives; and as such the terms "dramatism," "pentad," and "grammar of motives" almost denote the same thing in Burkean philosophy. Ever since the theoretical establishment of Burke's dramatism, there has emerged a plethora of studies that utilized the pentadic model in analysing texts, discourses, and many other symbolic acts of communication (e.g., Ling, 1970;Rosenfield, 1976;Jameson, 1978;Hahn & Morland, 1979;Brummeet, 1979Brummeet, , 1980Condit & Selzer, 1985;Birdsell, 1987;Lule, 1990;Cooks & Descutner, 1993;Appel, 1993Appel, , 1997Anderson & Prelli, 2001;Kenny, 2005;Blain, 2005;Stob, 2008;Prelli & Winters, 2009;Edgar, 2014;Head, 2016;Jensen & Ratcliffe, 2017;Jensen, 2018;Bloomfield & Tscholl, 2018;Ebigbagha, 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

A methodological synergy of dramatistic discourse analysis and corpus linguistics: From the discourse of US Presidents to Trump's 2016 Orlando speech

Salama¹

2021

Dil Ve Dilbilimi Çalışmaları Dergisi

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The present study offers a novel methodology for corpus-based discourse analysis that combines Kenneth Burke's (1968, 1969) dramatistic method of text analysis and the corpus techniques of keyword extraction and concordance reading. Applying the methodology, a two-stage analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 Orlando speech has been conducted: First, at a micro level, (i) the keywords used by Trump were identified in his speech as compared against the historical reference corpus of US Presidents through WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012), and (ii) Trump's keyword lexical structures were described and interpreted in the pentadic ratios rhetorically motivated by the "terministic screens" that select and deflect representations of the gay-nightclub-shooting event in the speech; second, at a macro level, the process of substantiating the whole speech event of Orlando was implemented in terms of the different types of substancegeometric, familial, and directionalrecognized in the keywords clustering and linking in the speech. The study has reached two findings. First, methodologically, Burke's dramatistic method of text analysis and corpus-linguistics techniques have been synergized in a novel way that contributes to analysing the rhetorical language of political discourse, eventually yielding a corpus-based dramatistic discourse analysis. Second, practically, analysing the pentadic ratios of the speech keywords and their substance types has revealed Trump's rhetoric of selecting and deflecting certain representations of the Orlando political event through a specific ensemble of terministic screens and substantiations.

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