Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item The Feeling of Persuasion: A Cognitive Rhetorical Account of the Emotional Appeal(2019) Mozafari, Cameron; Israel, Michael; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion often takes the back seat in contemporary rhetorical investigation, as emotions are treated as subjective reactions rather than the result of deliberate forms of argumentation. In classical antiquity, rhetorical training for emotional persuasion required students not only to learn what sorts of arguments could move their audiences but, more importantly, how that movement was composed linguistically and psychologically. Yet as history progressed and disciplines branched, the formal study of language and cognition separated from the study of rhetoric, resulting in a conceptually stunted understanding of the emotional appeal. This dissertation returns to classical questions and theories of emotional persuasion but does so with insights from contemporary emotion science and cognitive linguistics. Emotion is understood as neither purely physiological nor purely conceptual but rather as embodied conceptualizations grounded in culture-specific scripts. The dissertation lays out a model for understanding how non-emotive language links up to emotion activation through the introduction of the theater of the mind model, an expansion on the stage model of Cognitive Grammar. It then traces three strategies for arousing and controlling audiences’ emotions from classical rhetorical theory: the enthymematic activation of emotion concepts, the enargeiac amplification of emotion events, and the mitigation of potential threats so as not to excite emotions. Analyzing discourse from politics, fundraising letters, and college student writing, this project argues, contrary to popular opinion, that emotional appeals are not antithetical to reason but instead very much dependent on reason, in that they act as grounds for arousing and guiding inferences in predictable ways for rhetorical purposes.Item Chi-Thinking: Chiasmus and Cognition(2008-01-15) Lissner, Patricia Ann; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The treatise proposes chiasmus is a dominant instrument that conducts processes and products of human thought. The proposition grows out of work in cognitive semantics and cognitive rhetoric. These disciplines establish that conceptualization traces to embodied image schematic knowledge. The Introduction sets out how this knowledge gathers from perceptions, experiences, and memories of the body's commonplace engagements in space. With these ideas as suppositional foundation, the treatise contends that chiastic instrumentation is a function of a corporeal mind steeped in elementary, nonverbal spatial forms or gestalts. It shows that chiasmus is a space shape that lends itself to cognition via its simple, but unique architecture and critically that architecture's particular meaning affordances. We profile some chiastic meanings over others based on local conditions. Chiastic iconicity ('lending') devolves from LINE CROSSING in 2-D and PATH CROSSING in 3-D space and from other image schemas (e.g., BALANCE, PART-TO-WHOLE) that naturally syndicate with CROSSING. Profiling and iconicity are cognitive activities. The spatio-physical and the visual aspects of cross diagonalization are discussed under the Chapter Two heading 'X-ness.' Prior to this technical discussion, Chapter One surveys the exceptional versatility and universality of chiasmus across verbal spectra, from radio and television advertisements to the literary arts. The purposes of this opening section are to establish that chiasticity merits more that its customary status as mere rhetorical figure or dispensable stylistic device and to give a foretaste of the complexity, yet automaticity of chi-thinking. The treatise's first half describes the complexity, diversity, and structural inheritance of chiasmus. The second half treats individual chiasma, everything from the most mundane instantiations to the sublime and virtuosic. Chapter Three details the cognitive dimensions of the macro chiasm, which are appreciable in the micro. It builds on the argument that chiasmus secures two cognitive essentials: association and dissociation. Chapter Four, advantaged by Kenneth Burke's "psychology of form," elects chiasmus an instrument of inordinate form and then explores the issue of Betweenity, i.e., how chiasma, like crisscrosses, direct notice to an intermediate region. The study ends on the premise that chiasmus executes form-meaning pairings with which humans are highly fluent.