Implicatures in Altfatah Nando’s Short Movie Terlanjur Mencinta

YouTube has been flooded with contents within a movie genre, mostly the products by junior creators. It is therefore important to appreciate their works to maintain their creativities and innovations. Positive responses to such literary works are also required to improve their quality writing. The current study was aimed at identifying and at the same time construing the implicatures found in each act of the movie entitled “Terlanjur Mencinta” directed by Alfatah Nando. George Yule’s pragmatic theory (1996) was used in relation to implicatures caused by conversational maxims (Grice, 1975) supported by linguistic evidence-based contextual interpretation, namely utterances and stage directions. Findings show that generalized conversational implicatures were identified, namely 12 implicatures in which 42% was due to violation of manner maxim, 33% attributed to that of relation maxim, 17% due to that of quantity maxim, and 8% due to that of quality maxim. In addition, 4 conventional implicatures were found in the monologue. The study concludes that the implicatures can be easily understood through the contexts of situations. It is recommended that future researchers can formulate the ideal proportion and distribution of implicatures in a particular text in terms of quality, employing comparative rhetoric and a special research instrument.

THE INTERNET IS A SERIES OF ANALOGIES: COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AS POWER IN ONLINE GOVERNANCE

In 2006, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens became a laughingstock and enduring meme for arguing during legislative deliberations that the Internet could be understood as "a series of tubes" and “not a big truck" (Belson 2006). The unintended humor of his analogies was ridiculed as evidence that this older lawmaker was too out of touch with modern communications technology to effectively govern them. Yet the episode itself can be understood as evidence of a larger truth—one that both exculpates Stevens somewhat and underlines a broader challenge for internet governance: Namely, that nearly all internet laws and regulations necessarily rely on imperfect metaphor and analogy to keep them in accordance with pre-digital law and constitutional principles, and that even lawmakers and judges with considerable expertise in the field must also rely upon such figurative language. Furthermore, because rhetorical comparisons are fundamentally interpretive, rather than indexical reflections of the things they describe, their use in internet governance amplifies the risk that the prevailing laws and regulations will benefit some users over others, and some uses over others. The internet, in other words, is like a series of analogies. In this article, we catalog many of these analogies and metaphors, document their use in internet governance and policy, and critically investigate how the choice of comparative rhetoric to render the internet knowable introduces hidden bias into the governance process, benefiting some stakeholders over others.

What Characterizes Chinese Students’ Exposition Besides Deduction and Induction?: A Comparative Rhetoric Perspective

Rhetorical features of Chinese writers’ essays have been studied for decades but inconsistent interpretations of deduction and induction lead to controversial results. Taking a comparative rhetoric perspective, this paper clarifies the notions of deduction and induction and investigates what rhetorical features characterize Chinese expository paragraphs besides deduction and induction and whether Chinese EFL learners’ English paragraphs have similar features. Two kinds of data sources were used—29 full-score Chinese expositions in College Entrance Examinations and 29 English expositions written by Chinese EFL learners. The results show that deduction is preferred in both Chinese and EFL writing, and that rhetorical paragraphs and coordinate paragraphs are particular to Chinese writing while the EFL learners’ paragraphs display hybrid rhetoric such as semi-coordination. It is concluded that neither Chinese paragraphs nor EFL ones are similar to the modern English rhetorical paradigm, and English rhetoric instruction will facilitate the introspection of the two kinds of rhetoric.

Comparative rhetoric and emic approaches to Chinese persuasive strategies in hotel discourse

Many studies concerning culture and rhetoric have been restricted to the binary distinction of cultures or to etic perspectives by using western theories as framework to point out the weakness of Chinese rhetoric. Taking comparative rhetoric and emic approaches, this paper focuses on logical appeal and ethical appeal to discuss the cultural values reflected in the hotel discourses. In this study content analysis was used to encode the English and Chinese hotel introductions; quantitative method was used for data comparison and an interview for investigating the persuasiveness of the Chinese rhetorical strategies. The relation between cultural values and persuasive strategies was explored. It is concluded that cultural specificity at deep level is still an indispensable factor determining rhetorical strategies despite the globalization.

Rhetorical Approaches to Communication and Culture

The convergence of rhetoric, culture, and communication has led to the development of two predominant areas of study within the field of communication: intercultural rhetoric and comparative rhetoric. Intercultural rhetoric illustrates how culture-based arguments are constructed by advocates during intercultural interactions and how the arguments make sense within a particular cultural frame or worldview. These studies attempt to represent the cultural sensibility and rhetorical traditions invoked by a particular intercultural interaction. Rhetorical practices are seen as emerging from the beliefs and values of distinctive cultural communities, and the convergence of intercultural communication and rhetoric becomes evident when people act rhetorically and their diverse cultural assumptions gradually or suddenly become apparent during intercultural interactions. Comparative rhetoric focuses on the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions, past or present, in societies around the world. Comparison of (rather than interaction between) the rhetorical practices of two or more cultures is often the focus of comparative rhetoric studies. Comparison helps in the identification of rhetorical features in one culture that might not be evident otherwise, to unearth what is universal and what distinctive in any rhetorical tradition, including that of the West. Intercultural rhetoric and comparative rhetoric share some conceptual and methodological features; both fields are characterized by similar beginnings and some shared debates. However, they also have distinct characteristics, challenges, and historiographies. For intercultural rhetoric, approaching intercultural contexts and situations utilizing theories and concepts from rhetorical studies affirms non-Western modes of reasoning and advocacy. Recent methodological developments have allowed critics to more comprehensively represent rhetorical traditions and to discover novel ways to understand intercultural conflicts and mediate cultural differences. Conceptualizing rhetorical situations as intercultural dialogues suggests the ways in which intercultural rhetorical theorists need to be mindful of the multivocal quality of social discourses. Rhetorical interpretation of texts benefits from a comparative approach that allows for speculation with respect for and grounding in another culture’s history, as well as reflection on the cultural outsider’s motive and assumptions. It is useful for the quest of meaning not to be limited to the standpoints within each disparate culture; pragmatically, they must have a dialogue since comparative rhetoric allows the analysis of different discourses, the discovery of common grounds of engagement, and the revelation of cultural assumptions.