Corps de l’article

As the title states, the nine studies presented here focus on how rhetoric is exploited in specialised discourse. The editors’ introduction starts off with a very useful brush-up course on just what rhetoric is all about, going back to Aristotle and his advice on adapting a text, written or spoken, to a given audience. The viewpoints on the legitimacy of rhetoric since Antiquity are then sketched out as is its place in contemporary discourse analysis. The aim of the book is to demonstrate explicitly how Aristotle’s famous trinity, ethos, logos and pathos, are used in specialised or semi-specialised discourse situations, a brief which all the contributors take to heart. In doing this, they not only show how rhetoric is relevant to LSP but also contribute significantly to genre studies. As Resche puts it: “Depuis Aristote, rhétorique et genre sont étroitement liés, en fonction du but que chaque genre est censé poursuivre […]” (p. 116).

The result is a well-coordinated series of studies demonstrating how a rhetorical approach can contribute to accounting for textual genres. In spite of the French text, most of the studies included are on English, exclusively for seven of them with one each for French alone and French compared with English.

Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet and Shirley Carter-Thomas are well known for their studies on a number of important academic discourse genres, some mainstream, such as oral delivery of conference papers, others unjustly neglected such as lab notes, and others still about how the same content can move across genres, for example how a scientific experiment migrates from lab notes to a research article (Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas 2016). The present paper focuses on a relatively new genre, the three-minute presentation of a thesis project, which these authors have already published on in connection with new academic discourses on the Internet (Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas 2019). This chapter, which will be presented here in some detail as it announces those to come, is explicitly structured on an analysis of the three components of classical rhetoric mentioned above: logos, the motivated argument behind the thesis; pathos, putting the audience on the side of the thesis-candidate and ethos, where the credibility is constructed in and by the discourse. Looking in detail shows logos taking the form of move analysis: eight moves, of which two prove optional and three essential: motivation, objectives and implications. Pathos is particularly important in the exordium and the different methods of achieving this—including many non-verbal forms—are identified before going on to investigate other manifestations, in particular the use of humour. Ethos here takes the form of “street cred,” ploys used by the speakers to connect with and gain the sympathy of their supposed audiences. Indeed, the accommodations made for an audience, which is very different from that of a thesis defence or a conference paper, can be broken down into as many rhetorical moves. But the study in terms of rhetoric is not just an analytical tool, it is also diagnostic, leading the researchers to question the validity of this new genre in the academic context. Is the mastery of the three-minute thesis presentation really a skill which will serve PhD students in their academic career?

In the second chapter, Geneviève Bordet also uses rhetoric to follow up on the analysis of an academic genre which had not been given the attention it deserves either, namely the thesis abstract. The line of investigation follows those language markers that indicate the components of narrative scenarios found in a corpus of 30 abstracts, half from the didactics of mathematics, half from materials science, all written by native English speakers. The analysis reveals an extremely strong narrative in the didactics abstracts, closely adhering to the orientation/complication/evaluation/resolution/coda stages, revealed by personal pronouns and possessive adjectives, with specific reference via deictics (this thesis) and the verbs that go with them and more generally evidence of semantic prosody. For materials science, the narrative elements are few in number, as the approach here is essentially descriptive, characterised by passive verbs, which bring out the scientific objectivity of the discipline.

The special discourse of architects has not attracted much attention so far, with the notable exception of architectural metaphor, so Claire Kloppmann-Lambert’s paper is a welcome innovation, focusing as it does on project descriptions, a relatively new and generally composite genre developed in both paper and digital format, which incorporates a discourse of competence (what the architect can do) and a discourse of performance (what the architect actually does). The thrust of the analysis here is to bring out the persuasive elements of the strategy broken up into moves and steps, rather as for the thesis presentations, but with a more fine-grained structure. This paper is one of several which have a diachronic dimension, others being Laurence Harris’ on interpersonal rhetoric and linguistic politeness in the Bank of England speeches from Mansion House and Fanny Domenec’s use of short diachrony to examine changes over republications of controversial articles.

Rhetorical effects in the form of policy briefs edited by think tanks (American think tanks in this case), whose very existence is dependent on persuading politicians, would seem to be an ideal textual genre for investigating rhetoric. Mathilde Gaillard’s hypothesis is that the genre is characterised by a set of rhetorical strategies capable of responding to the demands of credibility that justifies think tanks’ intervention in political life (p. 89, our translation). The most effective rhetorical ploys of the logos of the demonstration turn out to be those using hedging and boosting, a theme taken up in several other chapters.

Catherine Resche continues the exploration of the relationships between rhetoric and genres by comparing the strategies used in three different genres in economics: the President of the Federal Reserves’ speech, CEOs’ annual letter and the addresses made by Nobel Prize winners, all written within the same timespan and all focusing on macroeconomics. The rhetorical structure of each is analysed with particular reference to the metadiscursive markers, both textual and interpersonal, allowing a precise attribution to each subcategory of the three genres, thereby facilitating direct comparison. Beyond this, attention is paid to “face management” (Face-Threatening Acts or FTA and Face Flattering acts or FFA), polyphony, narrative moves as well as metaphor and analogy, presented as strategies which are part of pathos.

Fanny Domenec focuses on three different types of discourse (scientific, media and institutional) associated with an event, that is the publication—which proved controversial—of a paper on the effects on rats of the pesticide Roundup. This is the article that goes into the most detail in calibrating how lexical variation is exploited for rhetorical ends, the three genres studied displaying “recadrage” or resetting to obtain perlocutionary effects (some of which may be questionable…).

Chiara Preite is well known for her work on different aspects of legal communication (Preite 2020) and here she focuses on facework in an original setting: that of the motivated decisions of the “French Supreme Court” (Cour de cassation) on judgments made by lower courts. Here the expressions of politeness, which can be positive or negative (FFA and FTA), are to be taken at the first or second degree.

The final paper, by Lucile Bordet and Denis Jamet, is the only chapter dealing with advertising, the archetype of modern rhetoric: it contrasts the rhetoric of cosmetic ads for women and men in French and in English, analysing the interplay of text and image, and concludes that all four subgroups are remarkably similar and that the main difference is that of the use of pathos.

Collective works are often only very loosely coordinated, but this is not the case with this publication. All the authors address the question of how rhetoric characterises different textual genres, using the same basic criteria so that the different studies can be compared one with another. This common basis does not preclude innovative methodology, however, and one of the positive features of this book is the use of new concepts and tools for textual analysis, new at least to this reader. The idea of polirudesse first defined by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni is invoked by Domenec to distinguish aspects of face management with relation to both logos and ethos (p. 157). Generally speaking, forms of politeness turn out to be an important rhetorical cue, even in genres not generally associated with savoir vivre. From the point of view of methodology, the different chapters all point to the complementary relationship between quantitative and qualitative approaches. This is exemplified in Resche’s chapter, where the quantitative steps, apportioning the data into the various categories proposed, are interpreted following a close reading of the texts used in the corpus, inciting the author to suggest a more pragmatically based approach to textual genres in the same field, rather than—or as well as—on their structure or format (p. 137).

This book lives up to its claim to demonstrate the relevance of classical rhetoric to specialised discourse studies, in particular as far as specialised genres are concerned and, at the same time, invites the reader to explore the authors’ previous research in this dynamic field.