The concept of privacy in relation to public figures is linked to the development and ubiquity of mass media. In times before photojournalists, paparazzi and social media, the private and public spheres functioned separately, with no insight provided into various aspects of users' lives. In the age of mediated reality, skilful management of the boundary between the private and the public can be an effective persuasive tool in the realm of ethos. Furthermore, persuasive objectives are evolving, as are the rhetorical principles that govern the development of ethos. In this article, I analyse how leading global politicians use the concept of privacy in public communication. The discussion focuses on types of private information disclosed, the effectiveness of such communication strategies and their impact on achieving persuasive goals, particularly the effective shaping of a positive public image.

The attacks of September 11 stand among the most rhetorically charged events that have shaped the collective imagination and political discourse of the twenty-first century. The global aftermath redefined national security, identity, and, crucially, the rhetorical function of borders. In the post-9/11 landscape, borders became discursive constructs, rhetorically framed to delineate justice from injustice, inclusion from exclusion, and served as rhetorical tools of exclusion and control rather than protection and unity. These shifting borders targeted marginalised communities, particularly migrants from third-world countries and those of Muslim descent deemed as a threat. Guantánamo Bay came to embody this ambiguous rhetoric of confinement, where language and law were manipulated to evade accountability. This study analyses how the film Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (2022) displays the formation and enforcement of physical and ideological boundaries. Through the lens of American exceptionalism as a rhetorical strategy, the film exposes how national security discourse redefines borders to justify exclusionary practices and extraordinary legal measures. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical framework of the ‘state of exception,’ the study examines how sovereign powers suspend legal norms while strengthening systemic control. Crucially, the analysis investigates how the film enacts rhetorics of resistance through its portrayal of the agency of migrants such as Rabiye Kurnaz, and the demand for visibility, dignity, and voice. By focusing on the rhetorical dimensions of national security, legality, and citizenship, this article contributes to an understanding of how borders are lines on a map but powerful rhetorical devices that shape lived realities.

Trump’s presidential announcement speeches and presidential nomination acceptance addresses were analyzed through the lens of a functional approach to political campaign discourse. In order to present themselves more favorably than their opponents, candidates typically engage in one of three rhetorical strategies: acclaiming, by emphasizing their own strengths; attacking, by diminishing their rivals' appeal; or defending, by responding to criticisms. This analysis focuses specifically on instances of acclaims and attacks in which themes related to immigration and immigrants are foregrounded. The findings indicate a discernible upward trend in the frequency of attacks directed at immigrants and foreign “Others”. A recurring metaphor in Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants is that of THE COUNTRY/NATION IS A HOUSE. Once established, this metaphor is employed with rhetorical precision, enabling the strategic manipulation of political discourse. Trump’s rhetoric thus contributes to a politics of fear and entrenches the binary opposition between “Us” and “Them.”

The article presents the results of a multimodal analysis of the covers of British, German, and Polish opinion weeklies, aiming to identify language-image configurations that we term verbal-visual collocations. In our view, verbal-visual collocations give rise to so-called visiotypes, which we define as ubiquitous, one-sided, highly simplifying, standardised visual routines for perceiving reality. These are processed automatically and reflexively, often without the support of verbal cues. They significantly influence and shape the awareness of specific discourse communities. As media-staged, connotation-rich, and highly symbolic images present in the public sphere, visiotypes reflect universal patterns of thought, similar to stereotypes, and are increasingly employed on magazine covers. Since visiotypes represent specific condensed and established combinations of image and text, we utilize a modified version of the model by Stöckl (2011, 2016) and Stöckl and Pflaeging (2022) for their multimodal analysis. Keeping pace with current times, we focus on key figures in international politics: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The analysis addresses questions such as which stereotypical representations and images of these politicians are (re)produced or evoked on the verbal and visual levels and what relationships between verbal and visual codes (possibly metaphorically reinforced) are employed to present the editorial stance on the cover and/or shape and reflect readers’ opinions. Furthermore, one of the goals of this analysis is to examine whether the category of verbal-visual collocation appears adequate and scientifically justified.

The article examines how the Ukrainian language has become a strategic battlefield in Russian propaganda, acting as a front in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It reports on the analysis conducted within the Discourse-Historical Approach of media statements made by Russian politicians and propagandists. It shows how current attacks on the Ukrainian language are a continuation of historical practices of linguistic repression. It reveals that the rhetoric of delegitimization of Ukrainian is based on recurring topoi, such as artificiality, primitiveness, and hostility, and on well-established mental models that legitimize Russia’s takeover. The results confirm that Ukrainian is not seen as a neutral communication tool but as a hostile element in the narrative of the uniformity of the “Russian World.” Russian depreciations and delegitimizations aim to deny the existence of a distinct Ukrainian national identity as a neo-imperialist strategy to subjugate Ukraine.

Excerpts from the most comprehensive ancient textbook on the theory and art of oratory, namely the Institutionis oratoriae libri XII by Marcus Fabius Quintilian, accompany the author in briefly presenting a (self)analysis of two university courses: Practical Rhetoric (offered in the field of e-editing and editorial techniques, publishing specialization) and Media Rhetoric (and Eristic) (Polish philology, editorial and media specialization).

The conquest of America brought with it the introduction of rhetoric as a model of teaching and as a practice in the different manifestations of religious discourse, of which the preaching or sermon was the most important for scholars of the colonial era (16th-18th centuries) who, on the other hand, gave little importance to the three political genres: deliberative, epideictic and judicial or forensic, although these had not disappeared as discursive practices. The great classical deliberative oratory had taken a backseat in New Spain but continued to develop in the consistories of the mayoralties and in public debates; the judicial genre continued to be exercised in lawsuits before the Inquisition and local judicial bodies and the epideictic genre was manifested in the lives of saints and praises of various kinds. This situation changed during the 19th century, particularly in the second half, when great parliamentary oratory, civic and patriotic speeches that flooded the republic and judicial oratory flourished because of the new political conditions brought about by the struggle for independence and the triumph of liberalism, in addition to other important genres such as history and journalism. The purpose of this essay is, first, to offer an outline of oratory practices and rhetorical teaching during the Colony, emphasizing the importance of sermons and the oblivion of other discursive expressions and, second, to show the emergence of political genres during the 19th century, which reached their greatest splendor in discursive practices and liberal education.

The paper discusses the relationship between leadership and expressivity as exemplified by the Polish President's address to the Ukrainian Parliament delivered on 22 May 2022. The study draws on existing understandings of expressivity and discursive leadership as well as previous studies on gesture in political rhetoric. Co-speech gestures are discussed as an interactional resource linked to emotion and evaluation, and as an inseparable part of the speaker’s public persona and identity. Following Bednarek (2011), the analysis considers the president’s expressivity at the micro-, meso- and macro-level, and it identifies a range of linguistic and gestural resources with which Andrzej Duda constructs a positive involved style while “communicating emotion” and “doing intensity.” The analysis also links the president’s linguistic expression of ardour and gestural behaviour to leadership capabilities, explaining how “relating to the audience” and “visioning” can stir and mobilise the audience in times of war and uncertainty.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

The article combines methods pertaining to Rhetorical Genre Studies and Discourse-Historical Approach in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s nomination acceptance speech which he delivered during the 2020 Confederation presidential primaries. The discussed genre of political speech is rarely realized in European contexts. Given various differences between the American and the Polish political systems, Bosak did not follow every pattern of the standard variant of the genre. Rather his speech appears to be more similar to a nomination acceptance speech of a third-party candidate. Overall, Bosak emerged as the leader of a divided and heterogeneous party, which was not given much attention by mainstream media. The paper investigates how these factors contributed to the structure and content of the speech. Moreover, recent decades have seen a rapid rise in significance of (far) right-wing movements in Europe. As Confederation is a relatively new political formation, there is a gap in research regarding the properties of its discourse. Thus, the present paper compares the discourse of the coalition with practices of politics of fear (Wodak, 2021).

This paper introduces the potentials of crossing critical rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis in analyzing public discourse concerning one of the “corona topics”, namely institutional communication about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The application of two complementary theoretical frameworks reveals discourse negotiation and naturalization of power and ideology in a persuasive discursive practice of issuing successive contradictory messages regarding the vaccine’s safety.

Aggressive rhetoric in Croatian political discourse became particularly prominent during the parliamentary election in 2015. A deep polarization of society yielded a new political option, one of the strongest since the beginning of Croatian independence in 1990. After the great election success, MOST got the opportunity to form the new Croatian Government either with HDZ or SDP, the two most influential parties in Croatia. This situation caused enormous tension in the postelection period and consequently intensified the politicians’ aggressive rhetoric. The aim of this study is to describe, interpret and explicate linguistic and rhetorical devices which contributed to the aggressiveness, and ultimately conclude which of the political options listed above is the most aggressive.

This article aims to investigate narrative reports based on the use of reported speech frames from a pragmatic-cognitive perspective. As rhetorical means of image creation and (de)legitimisation, they are frequently employed to represent utterances that constitute integral elements of short narratives incorporated into American presidential speeches. This paper’s main objective is to propose an original taxonomy of sayers, namely speakers of words reported (Halliday 1981, 1985; Vandelanotte 2006) in political discourse and to investigate their potential for self- and other-presentation and (de)legitimisation of one’s stance, actions and decisions. The data used for illustrative purposes comprise extracts from Barack Obama’s speeches delivered during his presidency (2009 and 2016) and have been selected from a bigger corpus of 125 presidential speeches by three American presidents: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. Findings in this study indicate that specific sayer types have greater potential for effective image formation and contribute to (de)legitimisation of events.

This paper is focused on the contextual use of the term “whataboutism” in contemporary American politics, specifically in the language of political news commentary. After tracking the word’s emergence in political discourse, some analysis of the term’s recent use in examples of commentary articles is done to explore what the term means as a rhetorical device that structures political conversations in the media and shapes political identities in the public sphere. Overall, “whataboutism” is found to be part of an asymmetrical media ecosystem polarizing the American electorate, and one of the rhetorical tools systematically used in maintaining political group divisions. How “whataboutism” is deployed in  political discourse and then grappled with or normalized by journalists is emblematic of trends in American journalistic discourse after the election results of 2016, and the term’s newfound prevalence is illustrative of the degree to which American identities have become politically tribalized.

The concept of black boyhood has always been marked with negative associations. American media usually portray black boys as a potential threat. Rather than focusing on their future, they treat black boyhood as an experience “in the now,” failing to consider the historical context of African American communities. Thus, they create a monolithic picture of young black men, which highlights only their faults. This way of imagining black boyhood has inspired African American authors and illustrators to talk back and join the national debate. Their picture books reject the public rhetoric of crisis and replace it with a new black narrative, which reconstructs the black male identity. The aim of this article is to analyze selected images of black boyhood included in the books, as well as to compare them with the message of today’s media.

This paper offers a review and analysis of speeches delivered by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Bush’s motivations, goals, and persuasive strategies are discussed in detail in the following study, with consideration for the cultural and political contexts of American oratory and the idiosyncratic features of the Republican as a public speaker. The characteristics of Bush's 9/11 communication acts are then compared with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech in order to analyze the differences between the two politicians' rhetorical modi operandi as well as the changing political environment of the U.S.

Because the goals leaders and organizations seek typically require persistent engagement over time, rhetorical leadership has as a central concern the long-term consequences of the leader’s rhetorical choices. Although traditional rhetorical theory downplayed this long-term perspective in favor of the singular rhetorical engagement (such as a speech), rhetorical theorists have begun considering the rhetorical implications of persuasion wrought over the long-run. This essay applies rhetorical consequentialism, a theoretical perspective developed by the author, to explain the orientation and strategies the rhetorical leader must consider in longterm persuasion. Leaders must be concerned about consistency over time to avoid charges of waffl ing, delusion, lying, hypocrisy, and the like if they are to maintain their ethos and that of their organizations. They also should take positive steps to create the symbolic and material conditions for rhetorical success over the long run. The essay describes „constraint avoidance” strategies that limit inconsistencies over time, as well as „stage-setting” strategies that prepare the symbolic and material ground for future rhetorical success. The essay draws examples from American political rhetoric, especially that of Donald Trump, to illuminate these strategies. The essay concludes by considering the challenges and prospects of such strategies.

A statistic can be a powerful rhetorical tool in political discourse, but it can also be quickly dismissed by a resistant audience. This article argues that the statistic’s association with Aristotelian inartistic proof (in Greek: pisteis atechnoi, Lat. probationes inartificiales) can, counterintuitively, encourage resistant audiences to be dismissive, to think that statistics “lie.” By drawing from the concept of framing in media studies, I explore how the language used around a calculation can better serve readers when it is more explicit about the statistic’s creation from a social process—that it is invented rather than used in argument. If statistics rely on interpretation, rhetors should invite their audience to interpret rather than insist on an interpretation. I use examples from news articles covering immigration in the United States to explore a frame that does such insisting and a frame that invites.

The article attempts to define the sacred as a symbol which is cognizable by the senses and which connects a human being with the divine reality. The sacred has two dimensions which indicate its ontological otherness and its integrating and standard-setting function. Separation of the sacred sphere from the public sphere renders the sacred to be worthy of respect and, at the same time, not to be subjected to any interference by unauthorized individuals and institutions. Taking care of the sacrum emphasizes the sublimity of this reality and provides for the respect towards those sharing the faith in the sacred. Preserving and promoting the significance of the sacred in human life aims at protecting spiritual sensitivity to good and beauty that motivates a human being to take noble actions and inspires him to adopt the attitudes characterized by love and service. The faith and the sacred sphere should be defended, above all, by the testimony given in words and actions, aimed at showing and justifying the rationality of the given deeds and service expressingand promoting love.

This essay examines three arguments made by anti-Trump evangelical Christians in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. By explicating the arguments from character, policy, and evangelical witness, I show how this group of minority rhetors – a minority both within American evangelicalism and within the American electorate at large – used their minority status to project a prophetic warning against the Trump candidacy and in so doing developed a rhetoric that was politically potent while remaining faithful to evangelical theology and history. Paradoxically, it was by losing the election that these anti-Trump rhetors won the opportunity to articulate clearly and forcefully an evangelical political rhetoric and an implicit policy agenda.

Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist beliefs in political discourse has brought on a new impetus in science to persuade the “hearts and minds” of the American population, inspiring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remaking of Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary Cosmos. Using Rudolph Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy, this article will define religion as an ineffable experience that creates “creature-consciousness,” or a sense of awe and insufficiency towards something outside the self, while also producing a sense of identification or “oneness.” The ineffable experience is core to the public making of science, just as the ineffable experience plays a defining role in religions. Though science and religion are often seen as mutually exclusively (sometimes in opposition), identifying the ineffable experience as a shared ground can provide opportunities for science and religion to dialogue in new ways.

Every year selected leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) speak to large audiences for regular devotional meetings at Brigham Young University, a private religious college in Provo, Utah. This study investigates the possibility that a rhetorical analysis of devotional speakers could be an effective way to observe typical language features in English public speaking that would be especially helpful for advanced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in improving their comprehension and expression skills. Using published transcripts and cassette tape recordings of these Latter-day Saint discourses, the analysis includes lexical, figurative, syntactic, schematic, tonal, and semantic aspects of each devotional speech. The results suggest that such religious discourses contain language details and rhetorical patterns in English that ESL students could learn to recognize, understand, and use persuasively.