The language of religious leaders expressed in their sermons characterizes the social characteristics of their groups. Over the past decades, most studies into cults specifically destructive cults and mainstream religion have mainly focused on their social-psychological characteristics with limited applicability to other religious groups. In this…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments…

This study, entitled, "Texture and textuality in Political Discourse: A Study of Cohesive Devices in President Goodluck Jonathan's Inaugural Address-May, 2011" was an analysis of the lexical cohesive devices employed by Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan in crafting his May, 2011's Presidential Inaugural Address (PIA). Guided by the…

The impersonalizing role passive voice plays in scientific discourse is well known. Analysis of the Methods sections of nine medical research articles shows that metonymy is another frequent strategy used to create anonymous authors/agents. Discourse agents were categorized into four semantic domains: familial lay, nonfamilial lay, authorial…

Numerous studies have affirmed the value of asynchronous online communication as a learning resource. Several investigations, however, have indicated that discussions in asynchronous environments are often neither interactive nor coherent. The research reported sought to develop an enhanced understanding of interactional coherence, argumentation,…

Analyzes the argumentational structure of a legal document. (AM)

This paper uses a corpus approach to investigate disciplinary variation in the construction of stance using nouns which are followed by "that" and a complement clause, "e.g. the argument that the Justices exhibit strategic behaviour..." Two corpora of theses written in English are examined: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

Examines the seven basic propaganda techniques (name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonials, plain folks, card stacking, and bandwagon) in terms of the principles of general semantics. (SR)

Presents and describes seven pictograms that correspond to the seven common propaganda devices described in another article in this issue. (SR)

Discusses the metalinguistic elements of argumentation in the legal definition. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

Questions the current distinction between semantics and pragmatics, and develops a theory of "argumentative scales" (Ducrot 1973), as well as a semantic model with three components and a revision of the notion of "illocutionary." (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

A discussion of ellipsis, the omission of information from a communication, argues that the fairly precise logical notion of ellipsis as used in philosophical analysis can be applied in the sociological study of ideology. It is proposed that ellipsis is a simple explanation of the workings of the language in which much potent ideology is embodied,…

Discusses the ethical and rational qualities of speech acts. (JMF)

An analysis of the role of the word "hence" and its near-synonyms examines the relationship between logic as a science, as a natural language, and as argumentation. The analysis is done in the context of elementary propositional logic. The first section is a limited discussion of the standard logician's treatment relegating "hence" to the realm of…