29.4015, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Tseronis, Forceville (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4015. Tue Oct 16 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4015, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Tseronis, Forceville (2017)

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Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:56:15
From: Natalie Amgott [amgottn at email.arizona.edu]
Subject: Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-430.html

EDITOR: Assimakis  Tseronis
EDITOR: Charles  Forceville
TITLE: Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres
SERIES TITLE: Argumentation in Context 14
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Natalie Amgott, University of Arizona

SUMMARY 

“Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres” is an edited volume
that unites the disciplines of journalism, linguistics, film studies,
anthropology, and media studies through the exploration of verbal, visual,
auditory, and embodied modes of argumentation. Each chapter details novel
approaches to analyzing arguments that highlight the interaction of semiotic
modes, recognizing how centuries of argumentation scholars have neglected the
power of alternative and interacting modes of argument. The authors emphasize
the construction of argument as a product and a process, and the effectiveness
of rhetoric based on author and intended audience. The chapters are organized
from multimodal argumentation and persuasion theory (Chapter 1), to rhetoric
analysis in photos, cartoons, and anthropological visuals (Chapters 2, 3, 4,
and 5), to argumentation in film and political advertising (Chapters 5, 6, and
7), to the analysis of gestures and discourse in public debates and speeches
(Chapters 9 and 10). 

In Chapter 1, Georges Roque criticizes the dominance of verbal argumentation
in the analysis of visual and verbal arguments, stating that visual arguments
not only persuade, but also argue on their own. While previous researchers
have seen images as purely persuasive and thus often manipulative, Roque
problematizes the theory underlying this supposition through his analysis of a
French home insurance poster, where he highlights the importance of visual and
verbal elements jointly contributing to the argument through the creation of
visual puns, persuasion, and metonymy. Additionally, Roque details the French
literature on “transpositionists” and “antitranspositionists,” or whether it
is possible to transpose verbal figures into visual figures. Roque resolves
the debate by considering rhetoric as more of a cognitive than linguistic
process, which prioritizes the use of both the verbal and the visual as
rhetorical resources to argue and persuade. 

Jens Kjeldsen further contextualizes the importance of the visual for
argumentation in Chapter 2, where he analyzes press photographs from September
11th, 2001 and from the 2015 migrant crisis to demonstrate how journalists’
photographs can serve as calls to action or can be remixed into
counter-arguments on Twitter. While press photographs are meant to be an
accurate representation and are thus not considered as part of argumentative
genres, Kjeldsen notes that such photographs influence viewers’ engagement and
create argumentative potential. By utilizing a situational textual-contextual
approach, Kjeldsen analyzes the epideictic, or not explicitly argumentative,
rhetorical functions of the “Victim 0001” photograph from 9/11 in creating a
united front in a time of mourning and praise for Americanism. Likewise, he
details the deliberative functions of the images of the dead refugee child,
Aylan Kurdi, as generating political advice and recommendation, and eventually
being appropriated into other media as counterarguments on Twitter. 

In Chapter 3, Leo Groarke turns to representations of Pinocchio in editorial
cartoons as an argumentative tool. In his investigation, he invents a novel
approach called ART (Acknowledging the multimodal, Recognizing the visual
argument, and Testing the arguments’ strength) to acknowledge the importance
of the visual in the Key Component (KC) arguments of an editorial cartoon.
These argument schemes graphically demonstrate the visual arguments through
analogies. Groarke further illustrates how cartoonists create visual arguments
through allusions to political figures as the cross-cultural, lying Pinocchio.
The analysis of nine Pinocchio cartoons from different cultures emphasizes the
value of political cartoons in capturing a broad audience for social and
political commentary by strategically compressing otherwise verbose arguments
into a single image. Groarke ultimately calls for further research on cartoon
corpora to further assess the power of arguments in political cartoons. 

Ian Dove likewise situates visuals as arguments in his Chapter 4 exploration
of the Raymond Dart vs. Elliot Smith “Australopithecus africanus”
archeological debate, highlighting interdisciplinary applications of
argumentation in the anthropology field. Dove combines argument schemes to
compare the visual renderings of “A. africanus” from Dart’s original 1925
claim that the species was a human ancestor to Smith’s rebuttal that the
species was rather related to modern apes. He aptly captures why Smith’s
visual renderings were so convincing to archeologists, even though Dart’s
findings were later proved correct. Dove uses a modified comparison scheme to
consider diagnostic features of the images and to highlight Smith’s choice to
illustrate the short Taung Child as gorilla-like next to the large, tall
Rhodesian man. His further comparisons of hair, tool-use, and posture
illustrate the impact of visual arguments in scientific and anthropological
research. 

In Chapter 5, Paul van den Hoven and Joost Schilperoord return to editorial
cartoons, noting that multi-domain cartoons build incongruities in which the
cartoonist fosters argumentative interpretations to informed audiences. They
critique Govier’s (2010) perspective that the viewer creates the argument,
claiming that the cartoonist can build an argument by requiring the viewer to
solve an incongruity based on their understanding of the socio-political
world. They further detail multi-domain cartoons as referring to one or more
auxiliary domains and lending themselves to argument creation, and mono-domain
cartoons as consisting of solely one domain and lending themselves more to
observation and less to argumentation. These domains are then applied to
clarifications of how to identify incongruities in their four-step analytical
protocol, which they apply to eight cartoons. The contradictions implied in
auxiliary domains allow the cartoonist to encode arguments for viewers to
discover in a way heretofore largely unexamined. 

Chapter 6 bridges to argumentation in film through Assimakis Tseronis and
Charles Forceville’s analyses of antitheses as argument structure in Frederick
Wiseman’s Direct Cinema documentaries. Like van den Hoven and Schilperoord’s
analysis of incongruities and Dove’s of contrasts in visual argumentations,
Tseronis and Forceville examine antitheses, or parallel contrasts, created
through multiple modes in Wiseman’s “fly-on-the-wall,” or Direct Cinema,
documentaries without voice-overs or other non-diegetic effects. The analyses
of antithesis between sequences, between and within shots, and throughout the
film Zoo reconstruct evaluative claims that are not explicitly stated through
contrasting parallel elements cinematographically by zooming or reframing,
editing between shots, and capturing parallels that convince the viewer to
perceive the film’s main claim even without the use of voice-over. 

In Chapter 7, Janina Wildfeuer and Chiara Pollaroli analyze the interplay of
multiple modes as persuasion devices in movie trailers. They categorize movie
trailers as enthymemes, in which the conclusion is left unclear for the
audience to actively hypothesize, in this case in order to motivate them to
see the film in theaters. They propose an integrated method of analyzing movie
trailers through inferential strategies and defeasible reasoning coupled with
a Pragma-Dialectic and Argumentum Model, which they illustrate through the
analysis of the trailer for the 2013 film, Gravity. Graphic organizers help to
categorize how each element of the trailer conveys a datum that leads to
premises and conclusions. They thus explain that movie trailers require the
audience to actively inference based on “part-whole” type, in which any
premise attributed to the trailer must also apply to the film as a whole.
Lastly, they propose analyses of movie trailer corpora to confirm these
findings. 

Magnus Hoem Iversen also examines film in Chapter 8, where he uses film
studies concepts to analyze how a political advertisement employs multimodal
elements to appeal to fear. He cautions against the use of verbal propositions
to summarize pictorial representations and utilizes informal logic to
illustrate how a political advertisement film can focus on the rhetoric of
audience interaction and intended actions that the audience should take after
watching. He details the appeal to fear in argumentation and political
advertisements and advocates for a film studies approach to argumentation to
examine the formal system, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound
in multimodal arguments. Like Tseronis and Forceville, Iversen details how
cinematographic and editing details like contrast, color, zoom, diegetic and
non-diegetic sounds can evoke the feeling of fear that then results in an
argument for (or against) a particular political candidate or party.  

In Chapter 9, Jérôme Jacquin highlights the importance of embodied
argumentation through gestures in public debates in Switzerland. Rather than
dividing the different modes, Jacquin uses Conversation Analysis (CA) to
analyze how the verbal and embodied modes interact as resources to create
argument structure and support argument schemes in a video-recorded corpus of
Swiss public debates. The CA framework allows him to examine the interactions
and in-betweens of turn-taking through gestures that claim the floor, gestures
pointing to a participant, and “metaphoric grasping gestures.” The former two
gestures are shown to mediate turns, avoid mutual gaze, and refer to
opponents, while the latter grasping allows the debater to metaphorically hold
the “law” or object in question to demonstrate control of the topic, educate
the audience about it, and build credibility. Ultimately, this fine-grained
analysis of transcriptions and accompanying video epitomizes research methods
for the dynamic nature of multimodal argumentation. 

In Chapter 10, Isabella Poggi also studies gestures, as well as facial
expressions, words, and voice in the perceived charisma of political leaders
through her analysis of a corpus of Mussolini’s discourse. She defines three
types of charisma (Proactive-attractive, Calm-benevolent, and
Authoritarian-threatening) through the dimensions of emotional intelligence,
sociability, competence, dominance, and emotional induction. Employing a
socio-cognitive model, Poggi deconstructs the “seeds of charisma,” or
multimodal facets of Mussolini’s speeches that combine to contribute to
persuasion through charisma. Ultimately, she identifies lexical
characteristics (“nice-wordism,” “strong-wordism,” and “new-wordism”),
incitations, orders, rhetorical questions, threats, discrediting acts like
insults, expressions of affect, empathy, and praise, and bodily behavior that
contribute to Mussolini’s authoritarian and threatening charisma, coupled with
instances of benevolence and pro-active attractive charisma. Her innovative
analysis and creation of categories results in a technique for measuring
charisma of different types in leaders through examinations of multimodal
discourses.  

EVALUATION

This edited volume represents multimodal argumentation and rhetoric in various
media genres through several disciplines, theoretical frameworks, and
approaches. The volume thoroughly addresses the dearth of research on the
importance of semantic modes other than the verbal in argumentation. Further,
the breadth of perspectives and approaches illustrates how concepts of
argumentation and rhetoric can be applied to photojournalism, editorial
cartoons, films, anthropological and linguistic findings and corpora,
political discourses, and advertising. While this breadth persuades the reader
of the value of argumentative and rhetorical approaches to analysis, in
attempting to prove that the visual can be as persuasive as the verbal, much
of the research in the volume sidesteps the value of other semantic modes and
how they interact together, such as the auditory, audiovisual, and embodied
modes. Poggi’s innovative and multimodal approach to discourse analysis in
Mussolini’s discourse can serve as a model for how to research not only each
mode individually, but also how they interact to argue or persuade an
audience. Jacquin, Iversen, and Tseronis and Forceville provide similar tools
for deconstructing the multimodal in film, with Iversen’s use of Bordwell and
Thompson’s (2004) film analysis questions and Jacquin’s use of Conversation
Analysis affording detailed analyses of how the modes interact and thereby
provoke interaction with the audience.

While these multimodal analyses prioritize investigations of arguments and
persuasion in multiple media, they disregard the importance of twenty-first
century media like social media, YouTube, websites, and blogs, in which the
user can multimodally interact with, and therefore contribute to, the authors’
original arguments. Digital argumentation and rhetoric is thus multimodal and
interactive by nature, with the possibilities of sharing, commenting,
appropriating, and transforming media for the same or other audiences within
mere seconds. The omission of new media is striking in a 2017 book that sets
out to create innovative methods and structures of multimodal argumentation.
Kjeldsen is the only author to mention the influence of new media genres in
his analysis of the rhetorical functions of the Aylan Kurdi refugee crisis
images. While not the main focus of his chapter, he demonstrates how
photojournalism lends itself to interaction and reuse on Twitter through the
transformation of the original image into various calls for action through
tweets of an image coupled with a tagline and hashtags. Further analyses of
multimodal argumentation in media genres should take Kjeldsen’s analysis as a
starting point. Hashtag searches (i.e. #AylanKurdi) and corpus building could
also be interesting ways to research the argumentative interactions on social
media regarding not only press photography that is later discussed online, but
also movements that begin online (e.g. #MeToo) and are then featured in the
press.

Ultimately, this book successfully responds to calls for research of
multimodal media that valorizes the argumentative nature of modes other than
the previously dominant verbal mode. The book’s broad purview makes it an
attractive resource to scholars of varying disciplines who wish to evaluate
the claims of a given media genre. As stated by editors Tseronis and
Forceville in the introduction, there is space for future research to continue
to collect corpora of multimodal media and apply or transform the approaches
in the book to their analyses. 

References: 

Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. (2004). Film art: An introduction (7th ed.). New
York: McGraw-Hill. 

Govier, T. (2010). A practical study of argument (7th ed.). Wadsworth: Cengage
Learning. 

Tseronis, A., & Forceville, C. (Eds.). (2017). Multimodal argumentation and
rhetoric in media genres (Vol. 14). John Benjamins Publishing Company.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Natalie Amgott is a PhD student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at
the University of Arizona. She holds a BA in French and Chinese and an MA in
French Linguistics, both from the University of Florida. Her research
interests center on incorporating new literacies in language teaching and
using program evaluation to investigate how such curricular changes impact
assessment, student retention, motivation, and agency in secondary and higher
education. She is a French instructor and specializes in pedagogy and program
administration, with career goals of working with teachers to coordinate
cross-curricular integration and to foster more internal program evaluations.





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