Seminar 4

Language and rhetoric. Non-verbal communication

1. Select a short story or an extract from a film. Analyse the language used in
the dialogue according to Jakobsons model. How is this language used strategically
to develop the story? If you are analyzing a visual text, explain how visual signs, such
as colours and the appearance of characters reinforce the effect created by verbal
signs.
2. Describe a communicative interaction at the university or place of work.
Analyse it using Hymess model. Did the participants act the way they did because of
the context and circumstances of the interaction? How would their behaviour and
their discourse differ in other circumstance? How important was non-verbal
communication in the interaction?
3. Consider the article by horror writer Stephen King in terms of pragmatic and
rhetorical analysis of a written text. While preparing, make sure you touch upon the
following points:
topic, channel, key;
format, i.e. structure;
style;
pragmatic aspects, such as the background knowledge of the addresser and the assumed
addressee;
rhetorical devices.
Stephen King: Why We Crave Horror Movies
I think that were all mentally ill; those of use outside the asylums only hide it a little better
and maybe not all that much better, after all. Weve all known people who talk to themselves,
people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is
watching, people who have some hysterical fear of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long
dropand of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater
showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not
afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may
not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists
through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like
roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50
ones appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.
We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately
conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die!
Confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or
a Diana Ross, we are still light years from true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.
Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isnt it? Because this is a very peculiar
sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced sometimes killed. One critic has
suggested that if pro football has become the voyeurs version of combat, then the horror film has
become the modern version of the public lynching.
It is true that the mythic, fairy tale horror film intends to take away the shades of greyit
urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children
again, seeing things in pure black and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on
this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality, and even outright madness is
extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free reinor no rein at all.
If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to
carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the
funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on
the other hand, your sanity leads you only to talk to yourself when youre under stress or to pick
your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your businessthough it is
doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.
The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most
saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream
and roll around in the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body and we recognize that
it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are
accepted even exalted in covolized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain
the status quo of civilized self. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness these are all the emotions that
we applaud, emotions that have been permanently immortalized in the couplets of hallmark cards
and in the verses (I dont dare to call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.
When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn
this even better before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a
sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, isnt it the sweetest little
thing? Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we
deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sisters fingers in the door, sanctions follow angry
remonstrance from parents, aunts, and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham, a spanking.
But anticivilization emotions dont go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have
such sick jokes as Whats the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of
dead babies? (You cant unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchforka joke, by the way,
that I heard originally from a ten-year-old). Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us
even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we
also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or
insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage
to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.
The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to
all that is worst in us. It is morbidly unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies
realizedand it all happens fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy
away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them Dawn of the Dead
for instance as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to
the hungry alligators swimming around in the subterranean river beneath.
Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me
up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with
that.
As long as you keep gators fed.
4. Compare two speeches given by two famous politicians. Analyse their
rhetorical patterns, using the terminology discussed. Who would you say the intended
audience is? How well do the texts target the audience?
October 2002 Barack Obama's 2002 Speech Against the Iraq War
I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil
War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the
sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery
from our soil.
I don't oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was
bombed, fought in Patton's army. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of
democracy that triumphed over evil.
I don't oppose all wars.
 After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I
supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter
innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such
tragedy from happening again.
I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash
war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other
armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our
throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a
rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from
corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great
Depression.
That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on
passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A
ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.... The world, and the
Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to
his neighbors...and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the
way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of
undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.
I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international
support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best,
impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. So for those of us who seek a more
just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda,
through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that
support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that...we vigorously enforce a
nonproliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and
ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never
use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country
stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle
East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and
tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up
without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through
an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.
Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The
battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.
The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in
our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we
ought not we will not travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who
would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with
their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.
War with Iraq speech by British Prime Minister Tony Blair
On Tuesday night I gave the order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq.
Tonight, British servicemen and women are engaged from air, land and sea. Their mission:
to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our country. But I
know also the British people will now be united in sending our armed forces our thoughts and
prayers. They are the finest in the world and their families and all of Britain can have great pride in
them.
The threat to Britain today is not that of my father's generation. War between the big powers
is unlikely. Europe is at peace. The Cold War already a memory.
But this new world faces a new threat: of disorder and chaos born either of brutal states like
Iraq, armed with weapons of mass destruction; or of extreme terrorist groups. Both hate our way of
life, our freedom, our democracy.
My fear, deeply held, based in part on the intelligence that I see, is that these threats come
together and deliver catastrophe to our country and world. These tyrannical states do not care for
the sanctity of human life. The terrorists delight in destroying it.
Some say if we act, we become a target. The truth is, all nations are targets. Bali was never
in the front line of action against terrorism. America didn't attack Al Qaida. They attacked America.
Britain has never been a nation to hide at the back. But even if we were, it wouldn't avail us.
Should terrorists obtain these weapons now being manufactured and traded round the world,
the carnage they could inflict to our economies, our security, to world peace, would be beyond our
most vivid imagination.
My judgment, as Prime Minister, is that this threat is real, growing and of an entirely
different nature to any conventional threat to our security that Britain has faced before.
For 12 years, the world tried to disarm Saddam; after his wars in which hundreds of
thousands died. UN weapons inspectors say vast amounts of chemical and biological poisons, such
as anthrax, VX nerve agent, and mustard gas remain unaccounted for in Iraq.
So our choice is clear: back down and leave Saddam hugely strengthened; or proceed to
disarm him by force. Retreat might give us a moment of respite but years of repentance at our
weakness would I believe follow.
It is true Saddam is not the only threat. But it is true also - as we British know - that the best
way to deal with future threats peacefully, is to deal with present threats with resolve.
Removing Saddam will be a blessing to the Iraqi people. Four million Iraqis are in exile.
60% of the population dependent on food aid. Thousands of children die every year through
malnutrition and disease. Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes or murdered.
I hope the Iraqi people hear this message. We are with you. Our enemy is not you, but your
barbarous rulers.
Our commitment to the post-Saddam humanitarian effort will be total. We shall help Iraq
move towards democracy. And put the money from Iraqi oil in a UN trust fund so that it benefits
Iraq and no-one else.
Neither should Iraq be our only concern. President Bush and I have committed ourselves to
peace in the Middle East based on a secure state of Israel and a viable Palestinian state. We will
strive to see it done.
But these challenges and others that confront us - poverty, the environment, the ravages of
disease - require a world of order and stability. Dictators like Saddam, terrorist groups like Al Qaida
threaten the very existence of such a world.
That is why I have asked our troops to go into action tonight. As so often before, on the
courage and determination of British men and women, serving our country, the fate of many nations
rests.
5. Select a text aimed to persuade. This could be a politicians speech (famous
speeches are transcribed in encyclopaedias and dictionaries of speeches), an editorial
in a magazine, the web site of a corporation, etc. Analyse its rhetorical patterns, using
the terminology discussed. Who would you say the intended audience is? How well
does the text target this audience?
6. Select an article from a magazine targeted at a specific audience. Analyse it
in terms of its rhetorical strategies. How effective are they? If there are visuals, such
as pictures or photographs, discuss their impact. How do they relate to the written
words? Would you delete or add any elements to enhance the effect? You can extend
this activity by writing your own article for that magazine. Select a visual (picture or
graphic) and explain how your words complement the visual.
7. Analyse the advertisement below in terms of its intended audience and
strategies. How effective are they? Discuss impact of visuals. How do they relate to
the written words? Would you delete or add any elements to enhance the effect?
http://adamnorwood.com/2007/04/
CLEO EDGE 2007 UT LAW ADVERTISEMENT