Article published in:
The Conversation Frame: Forms and functions of fictive interaction
Edited by Esther Pascual and Sergeiy Sandler
[Human Cognitive Processing 55] 2016
► pp. 131–150

Invocation or apostrophe?

Prayer and the conversation frame in public discourse

| Rutgers University Camden, USA
| Case Western Reserve University, USA

We investigate how idioms of prayer operate along a complex set of rhetorical dimensions, all of which take the conversation frame as a starting point. We present results of a search of idioms from the UCLA NewsScape archive. After distinguishing invocationary acts of the divine from the more “fossilized” apostrophic (i.e. fictive) reference to the divine, we propose a four-dimensional model of prayer. Each dimension is an axis bounded by two poles: factive/ fictive, pathos, ethos, and attitude. Instances of prayer often manifest alignments and misalignments along one or more of these axes.

Keywords: broadcast television, fictivity, rhetorical analysis, rhetorical figures
Published online: 01 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.55.07fit
References
Bakhtin, M.M
(1984) Problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. C. Emerson (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Benveniste, E
(([1966] 1971)) Problems in general linguistics. M.E. Meek (trans.). Miami: University of Miami Press.Google Scholar
Burke, K
(1961) The Rhetoric of religion: Studies in logology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
(1969a) A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
(1969b) A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J
(2007) The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
FitzGerald, W
(2012) Spiritual modalities: Prayer as rhetoric and performance. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, G
(1991) Aristotle’s on rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lanham, R
(1991) A handlist of rhetorical terms (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Nesset, T., Endresen, A., Janda, L. Makarova, A., Steen, F., & Turner, M
(2013) How here and now in Russian and english establish joint attention in TV news broadcasts. Russian Linguistics, 37, 229–251. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pascual, E
(2006) Fictive interaction within the sentence: A communicative type of fictivity in grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 17(2), 245–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014) Fictive interaction: The conversation frame in thought, language and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perelman, Ch., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L
(1958) Traité de l’argumentation. Paris: Presses Universities de France.Google Scholar
Talmy, L
(2000) Toward a cognitive semantics: Volume 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Trevarthen, C
(2011) What is it like to be a person who knows nothing?: Defining the active intersubjective mind of newborn human being. Infant & Child Development, 20(1), 119–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Leiva Rojo, Jorge
2019. Metatextual indicators and phraseological units in a multimodal corpus. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 5:3 ► pp. 241 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.