Aristotle’s vigorous vindication of rhetoric pairs it with dialectic. Dialectic, for Aristotle, combines logical propositions with induction from rigorous evidence in an effort to prove a case beyond doubt. Rhetoric parallels dialectic, but combines arguments with examples in an effort to persuade. Neither one amounts to science, which for Aristotle requires irrefutable establishment of general...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which Portuguese companies have incorporated equalityand diversity-related issues into their management discourse, and examine the prevalent rhetoric on these matters. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive content analysis of the web sites of the 500 largest companies plus the 20 best companies to work for in Portugal, in 20...

This paper aims at an initial analysis and explanation of lean through the lens of the discipline of rhetoric. First, the ancient origin, central ideas, subsequent history and current interpretations of rhetoric are outlined. Then, the overall meeting points of rhetoric and lean are discussed. At the outset, it is contended that certain arguments that can be used as a justification in rhetoric ...

Newspaper editorials constitute a part of media discourse, which is an extremely important field of research in both intercultural rhetoric analysis and EFL/ESL studies. Specifically, certain features of editorial headlines and also their important role in monitoring and directing readers' attention have made the interface between the linguistic analysis of newspaper editorial headlines and tea...

The sentences “but” are used frequently in natural languages. However, the semantics of “but” has not yet been well studied in logic and reasoning. Contrastive reasoning is the reasoning with contrasts which are expressed as contrary conjunctions like the word ”but” in natural language. Contrastive answers are more informative for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, as compared with the usu...

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive l...

Semantic theories on focus and information structure assume that there are different accent types for thematic (backwardlooking, known) and rhematic (forward-looking, new) information in languages as English and German. According to Steedman [1], thematic material may only be intonationally marked (= bear a pitch accent), if it “contrasts with a different established or accommodatable” theme [p...

In two speeded acceptability experiments we tested which combination of prenuclear accent, nuclear accent and f0interpolation between them is best suited to signal a double contrast in German (i.e., a contrastive topic followed by a contrastive focus). The experimental utterances differed in the prenuclear accent (medialvs. late-peak, i.e., L+H* vs. L*+H), the nuclear accent (earlyvs. medial-pe...

This paper argues for treating the Mandarin sentence-final particle ne as ambiguous between marking contrastive topic, in the sense of Büring 2003, and marking durative aspect. This account is novel is two ways. First, it rejects the widespread view that ne never marks aspect, representing a revival of Chan’s (1980) classic aspectual analysis. Second, while topic-marking ne is known to mark con...

The Japanese 'adverbial particle' wa is usually argued to have topic and contrastive functions. The previous analyses on contrastive function of wa have two problems. First, they fail to account for 'association with contrast' in complex NP. Second, the notion of contrast has not been made explicit enough to account for an asymmetry between contrasts involving and not involving wa. This paper a...