Overview

Rhetoric is intimately related to interaction and cognition. This book explores the cognitive underpinnings of rhetoric by presenting a case study of the rhetorical use of interactional structures, namely expository questions and rhetorical questions, in the classical Chinese tradition. Such questions are generally meant to evoke silent answers in the addressee’s mind, thereby involving a fictive type of interaction. The book analyzes fictive questions as intersubjective mixed viewpoint constructions, involving a viewpoint blend of the perspectives of the writer, the assumed prospective readers, and possibly also that of the discourse characters. The analysis further shows that in addition to attention, other late developing human capacities such as mental simulation and perspective taking also have a pivotal role to play in rhetoric, on the basis of which a simulation-based rhetorical model of persuasion is proposed to account for meaning construction in rhetorical practices. The book will influence our understanding of rhetorical practices outside the Western tradition but within the framework of cognitive semantics.

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9789027213792

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This terrific book boldly goes where no other book has gone before. While we have an important and growing body of scholarly literature on Chinese rhetorical theory and practice, and a growing literature that tries to engage rhetoric and argumentation from the perspective of cognitive science, I know of no other work that brings these two lines of thinking into conversation. The result is an innovative, creative, and productive work that not only adds to our understanding of rhetorical theory, but provides a generative reading of an important and interesting philosophical text, the Zhuangzi, along with its use of expository and rhetorical questions. This book will be of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, rhetoric, Chinese philosophy, and literary analysis. -- Edward Schiappa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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