The focus of this article is the deictic evaluative construction that’s, as used by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates. A summative clause, often toward the end of a discourse turn, opened by the distal demonstrative pronoun that, has a persuasive function,… read more
Apologies have been a rewarding target for research in the pragmatics tradition; however, few studies connect apologies to hypocrisy. This chapter is an attempt to do so. I approach the pragmalinguistic aspects of hypocrisy by examining two notorious apologies: Clinton’s 1998 apology for his… read more
This article investigates the rhetorical strategies deployed by President Clinton and Senator Dole during the 1996 presidential debates. Clinton resorted to implicit persuasion and audience-oriented rhetorical strategies, while Doles persuasion was more explicit, and he did not avoid the use of… read more