Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing. Jaargang 30

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Abstracts Volume 30 no.2 2008

Rian Timmers, Ester Šorm, Peter Jan Schellens and Hans Hoeken
Radboud University of Nijmegen
The reasonableness and persuasiveness of normatively strong and normatively weak arguments

ABSTRACT: Social-scientific research shows that the quality of an argument can influence the acceptance of a standpoint. The question as to what features make an argument weak or strong, still forms a crucial problem in persuasion research. Argumentation theory puts forward certain criteria that determine the quality of an argument. This study looks both at language users’ judgements on the reasonableness of arguments that, according to the norms of argumentation theory, should be either weak or strong and to what extent these arguments are considered persuasive. In an experiment, the perceived reasonableness and the actual persuasiveness of normatively strong and normatively weak arguments from authority and arguments from cause to effect were manipulated. 50 participants were asked to judge 16 argumentative texts on their reasonableness. 50 other participants were asked to indicate to what extent they agreed with the standpoints from the same 16 texts. Results showed that normatively strong arguments were considered more reasonable than normatively weak arguments and that normatively strong arguments were regarded as more persuasive than their weak counterparts.

KEYWORDS: actual persuasiveness, argument quality, argument from authority, argument from cause to effect, experiment, perceived reasonableness

Francisca Snoeck Henkemans
University of Amsterdam
The figure of speech praeteritio as a means to manoeuvre strategically

In this paper I, investigate what role the figure of speech praeteritio can play in arguers’ attempts to reconcile their rhetorical with their dialectical aims by manoeuvring strategically when carrying out particular discussion moves that form part of the dialectical procedure for resolving a dispute. Praeterio is a figure of thought in which a speaker or writer proposes not to bring something up and thereby draws attention to it. I shall first pay attention to the ways in which praeteritio can be realized in discourse. Next, I shall give an analysis of the effects the use of praeteritio may have due to the presentational means that are employed. Finally, I shall discuss what the possibilities for strategic manoeuvring with this device might be, and give some idea of the kinds of derailments in which the use of

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KEYWORDS: evading the burden of proof, paralipsis, praeteritio, strategic manoeuvring

Jos Hornikx and Robert-Jan Hof
Radboud University Nijmegen
The influence of country-of-origin of products on the persuasivness of foreign languages in advertisements

ABSTRACT: Foreign languages are often used in product advertisements. The use of foreign languages is said to evoke positive associations, which would enhance the ad's persuasiveness. On the basis of country-oforigin research, foreign languages are expected to be more effective if they have a good fit with the product advertised (Domzal, Hunt, & Kernan,1995;Hornikx & Starren, 2006). Thus, French is expected to be more effective in ads for perfume than in ads for televisions. In order to test empirically whether ads with suitable products are more effective than ads with non-suitable products, an experiment was conducted. Participants (N = 150) judged a number of ads with German, French, or Spanish slogans. Some ads featured suitable products (e.g., oranges with Spanish), and others non-suitable products (e.g., washing machine with Spanish). The results confirmed the expectation:multilingual ads for suitable products were more effective than multilingual ads for non-suitable products.

KEYWORDS: advertising, country-oforigin, foreign language persuasiveness

Daniël Janssen, Frank Jansen and Gertrude de Pater
University of Utrecht
Changes in the use of the formal and informal pronouns in Dutch

ABSTRACT: Over the past decades we have seen a decline in the use of ‘u’ as the address pronoun in favor of the more informal ‘je’. Previous research has shown that ‘je’ has become at least equivalent to ‘u’ in the perception of average readers. That is: readers evaluate texts in which they are addressed with ‘je’ the same as texts with ‘u’. To gain more insight in this development in pronoun use, we conducted an experiment in which we compared the evaluation of the address pronouns by ‘average’ readers (nonchristians, protestants, catholics) to the evaluations by conservative reformed protestants, the so-called ‘bevindelijk gereformeerden’. In a between-subject design both groups evaluated two leaflets in a je and a u-version. Results show that the groups only differ in the appreciation of u. The ‘bevindelijken’ value u-texts more highly than text with je, for the other group the text versions were more equivalent. Both groups did not differ in their appreciation for je, indicating that je is becoming the standard.

KEYWORDS: address pronouns, Dutch, language user's appreciation

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Ted Sanders and Marlies Staphorius
University of Utrecht
Readability and text structure in educational texts for primary school

ABSTRACT: Readability researchers claim it is possible to predict the readability of a text on the basis of text characteristics like word and sentence length. The classical criticism on readability research is that there is no causal relationship between these characteristics and their effect on text comprehension. Despite this critique, successful formulas exist that do predict readability, such as the Cito LeesIndex voor het Basisen speciaalonderwijs (CLIB), which predicts the level for which a given educational text is suited (Staphorsius & Krom, 1985ab; Staphorsius, 1994). What is the relationship between this readability predictor and text characteristics that can be expected to influence text comprehension, such as discourse structure and coherence? We explore the correlation between three fundamental text characteristics and readability scores. We analyzed the discourse structure of educational texts for children at primary school and compared these analyses to the criterion on which CLIB-scores are based: cloze-tests. We found high correlations for positive and causal relations, as well as for explicitness of relations. The results are very interpretable, but due to the limited amount of texts studied, we have to be reluctant with general conclusions. We argue in favor of the further study of the relation between text complexity and readability. It is high time to undertake systematic research on this issue in the Dutch language.

KEYWORDS: discourse structure, educational texts, readability, text complexity