Book Launch: Vessela Valiavitcharska and Michael Israel

Join us as faculty members Vessela Valiavitcharska and Michael Israel discuss their recent books:

Cambridge University Press offers this description for Valiavitcharska, Rhetoric & Rhythm in Byzantium: The Sound of Persuasion (2013):

Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium takes a fresh look at rhetorical rhythm and its theory and practice, highlighting the close affinity between rhythm and argument. Based on material from Byzantine and Old Church Slavonic homilies and from Byzantine rhetorical commentaries, the book redefines and expands our understanding of both Byzantine and Old Church Slavonic prose rhythm. It positions rhetorical rhythm at the intersection of prose and poetry and explores its role in argumentation and persuasion, suggesting that rhetorical rhythm can carry across linguistic boundaries, and in general aims to demonstrate the stylistic and argumentative importance of rhythm in rhetorical practice. Along the way, it challenges the entrenched separation between content and style and emphasizes the role of rhythm as a tool of invention and a means of creating shared emotional experience.

Read more here [1].

Of Michael Israel's volume The Grammar of Polarity: Pragmatics, Sensitivity, and the Logic of Scales (2011), Cambridge UP offers this description:

Many languages include constructions which are sensitive to the expression of polarity: that is, negative polarity items, which cannot occur in affirmative clauses, and positive polarity items, which cannot occur in negatives. The phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has been an important source of evidence for theories about the mental architecture of grammar over the last fifty years, and to many the oddly dysfunctional sensitivities of polarity items have seemed to support a view of grammar as an encapsulated mental module fundamentally unrelated to other aspects of human cognition or communicative behavior. This book draws on insights from cognitive/functional linguistics and formal semantics to argue that, on the contrary, the grammar of sensitivity is grounded in a very general human cognitive ability to form categories and draw inferences based on scalar alternatives, and in the ways this ability is deployed for rhetorical effects in ordinary interpersonal communication.

Additional details available here [2].