Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing. Jaargang 30

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Abstracts Volume 30 no.1 2008

Joost Schilperoord
Univerity of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Optimal innovations: rhetorical and cognitive characterisation of a figure of speech

ABSTRACT: Rachel Giora's optimal innovation hypothesis is a processing hypothesis concerning the semantic response language users have viz a viz a certain type of innovative use of language. Such innovations are judged ‘optimal’ if they involve a novel response, but at the same time allow for the recovery of some salient meaning from which the novel response originates. An example is the innovative expression weapons of mass distraction. It is optimal because it allows a novel response ‘distraction’ to be linked to the salient response that follows from the fixed expression weapons of mass destruction to the effect of construing weapons of mass destruction is distraction. This paper is an attempt, first, to explore the linguistic features of the kind of innovations that are subject to the optimal innovation hypothesis. The main outcome concerns the crucial role of fixed expressions in constructing optimal innovations. The second part of the paper explores aspects of processing optimal innovations, especially the question how we can account for the way language users construe the ‘double meaning’ of such innovations. What renders optimal innovations a special (and interesting) case of language processing concerns the fact that language users form conceptual structures that are not part of the input.

KEYWORDS: rhetoric, figures of speech, cognitive linguistics, innovative expression

Marleen Kieft and Gert Rijlaarsdam
Instituut voor de lerarenopleiding, University of Amsterdam.
Effect of adapting instruction to students’ writing strategies on literary interpretation skill and writing skill. An empirical study?

ABSTRACT: In this article, we propose to link the studies of writing-to-learn and learning-to-write to the theory of Aptitude-Treatment Interaction (ATI). In an experimental study we examined the effects of a course on ‘Writing about literary stories’ consisting of writing tasks adapted to either a planning or a revising writing strategy. We hypothesized that the effects of writing tasks depend on the interaction between students’ preferred writing strategy and the type of writing instruction, matching or mismatching students’ writing strategy. Our match hypothesis was in the main confirmed for writing-to-learn: results indicated that adapting writing tasks to students’ wri-

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ting strategies increases their learning in the field of literature. For learning-to-write we found no interaction effects: all students benefited from the course, irrespective of writing strategy or condition.

KEYWORDS: writing skills, literary interpretation, aptitude-treatment interaction

Jan Albert van Laar
University of Groningen and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
You can't say that

ABSTRACT: According to the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation, parties in a discussion manoeuvre strategically between dialectical and rhetorical objectives. A confrontational type of manoeuvring happens when a critic charges an arguer with having advanced a standpoint that might lead to socially unacceptable consequences. In extraordinary circumstances, this way of manoeuvring can be dialectically sound. The exact line between fallacious and legitimate instantiations of this way of manoeuvring will be studied by examining the soundness conditions of this kind of move.

KEYWORDS: standpoint, strategic manoeuvring, confrontation stage, negative consequences

Eveline T. Feteris
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Strategic manoeuvring with unacceptable consequences and the intention of the legislator: manifestations of strategic manoeuvring in the justification of legal decisions

ABSTRACT: The author gives an analysis of the strategic manoeuvring in the justification of legal decisions from a pragma-dialectical perspective by showing how a judge tries to reconcile dialectical and rhetorical aims. On the basis of an analysis and evaluation of the argumentation given by the US Supreme Court in the famous Holy Trinity case, it is shown how in a case in which the judge wants to make an exception to a legal rule for the concrete case tries to meet the dialectical reasonableness norm by seeing to it that the standpoint is defended according to the requirements of the legal burden of proof and how he tries at the same to me to be rhetorically convincing for the legal audience by presenting the decision as a choice that is in line with the preferences of the legal audience.

KEYWORDS: legal argumentation, strategic manoeuvring, burden of proof, legal interpretation, critical discussion, rhetorical strategy, precedent, obiter dictum

Casper Troost, Frank Jansen and Ted Sanders
University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Does cognitive economy determine the position of temporal and causal clauses? A corpus investigation of principles behind text production.

ABSTRACT: Language users producing a complex sentence have a linearization problem: the dependent clause can get the initial or final position in a sentence. Which factors determine the choice? This question should be answered in a theory of text production. And an important component of this theory is the principle of cognitive economy. This principle predicts that writers will apply thematic coherence in situations

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here they have sufficient time and facilities available. In situations where is not the case, writers are expected to use the default strategy of frame structuring. This economy principle is tested here, by presenting the results of a comparative analysis of two text corpora: policy documents and protocols of chat boxes. These two text types differ in the amount of cognitive energy that writers can use during the formulating phase of text production. The results show that the economy principle partly makes the right predictions.

KEYWORDS: Text production, cognitive economy, clause combining, corpus studies, linearization.