[C]ausal statements are commonly made in some context, against a background which includes the assumption of some causal field. A causal statement will be the answer to a causal question, and the question ‘What caused this explosion?’ can be expanded into ‘What made the difference between those times, or those cases, within a certain range, in which no such explosion occurred, and this case in ...

The above quotes reflect two notions of rhetoric which sometimes conflict, but are often and paradoxically held simultaneously. Francis Bacon emphasizes the ability of this subject to aid in the advancement of one’s learning and opinions within society. Contained within Whistler’s humor is the equally serious suggestion that voices will frequently encounter competition in the form of other spea...

The NTSB’s use of rhetoric can provide us as rhetoricians, professional writers, and others with new insights into rhetoric as a persuasive tool. The NTSB relies wholly on its rhetoric to persuade those who have decision-making authority to follow its recommendations. In this paper, I will discuss how the NTSB provides new insights into the persuasiveness of documents from a bureaucratic organi...

We presents prosodic cues, i.e. duration, average F0 (M-F0), F0 slope (D-F0) and spectral center of gravity (CoG), to the functions acknowledgment, continuer, disagreement, surprise, enthusiasm and uncertainty as expressed via short vocal feedback by a professional voiceover artist. The post-hoc tests showed that most functions were expressed with a rather contrastive prosody and in a consisten...

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Forschungsvorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministers f ur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie unter dem F orderkennzeichen 01 IV 102 H/0 und 01 IV 102 F/4 gef ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei den Autoren. ABSTRACT Automatic dialog systems tested with naive users are often confronted with special speaking style...

This paper reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch NPs. Accent-patterns were obtained in a (semi-)spontaneous way via a simple dialogue-game with 8 Dutch speakers and 4 Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, a...

In this paper, we propose an online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, positive negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations then projected into feature space. Therein, learning respectively conducted in row column space by maximizing simil...

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

Anthony Downs assumed no false information, and no irrationality. Neither of these assumptions is realistic in politics. Adam Smith recognised the role of rhetoric (deliberative eloquence) in political debate. The significance of propaganda was recognised in the 1940s. Modern approaches to political processes, agenda setting and discourse analysis also emphasise persuasion. This paper begins by...

This article presents new evidence from English that the theory of grammar makes a distinction between the contrastive focus and discourse-new status of constituents. The evidence comes from a phonetic investigation which compares the prosody of all-new sentences with the prosody of sentences combining contrastive focus and discourse-new constituents. We have found that while the sentences of t...