This seminar deals with questions that have to be considered in designing and conducting research of any kind in rhetoric and discourse studies. We consider some of the legal and ethical questions that arise in research about human life. We then consider, in detail, the question of standards of evidence and modes of argumentation, discussing a variety of research paradigms, both qualitative and quantitative, and exploring how researchers in various paradigms design, carry out, and evaluate their work. This course explores how to move from a stretch of speech or writing or signing outward to the linguistic, cognitive, cultural, psychological, and rhetorical reasons for its form and its function. In the process, methodological issues involved in collecting texts and systematically describing their contexts are explored.
Students work with data arising from their own work as well as with data provided by the instructor.
Methodological issues may include ethnographic participant-observation, transcription and entextualization, qualitative analytical heuristics and standards of evidence. This course is a one-semester introduction to theories of language and their implications for theories of rhetoric. The course covers theories of language underlying some of the major strands of empirical and philosophical studies of language, including Saussurean structuralism and approaches branching out from structuralism, such as generative grammar, cognitive linguistics, speech act theory, semiotics, and poststructuralist linguistic theory. The course supplements the study of rhetoric, the effective use of language, with the study of how language itself has been conceived and constructed through the ages. Its significance lies in tracing the uneasy border between language use and language structure, that is, between rhetoric and grammar.