Rhetorical strategies for appeal to logos in research abstracts: an analysis of rhetoric

H.A. Mohamad; Z. Pilus; M. L. Mohaini; R. B. Md Zolkapli; N. H. Abdul Wahab

doi:10.33306/mjssh/200

H.A. Mohamad Akademi Pengajian Bahasa, UiTM, Shah Alam, Malaysia
Z. Pilus Department of English Language and Linguistics, IIUM, Selangor, Malaysia.
M. L. Mohaini Akademi Pengajian Bahasa, UiTM, Shah Alam, Malaysia
R. B. Md Zolkapli Akademi Pengajian Bahasa, UiTM, Dengkil, Malaysia
N. H. Abdul Wahab Akademi Pengajian Bahasa, UiTM, Shah Alam, Malaysia

Abstract

This study examined the use of two rhetorical strategies - nominal-numerical types of supporting data and lengthy complex types of sentences due to their rhetorical appeal to Aristotelian logos in the writing of research abstracts. A total of 480 research abstracts sampled from English as a Native (ENL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) were analysed with LIWC2015 software application and Readable.com online applications. Guided by the Connor’s (1996)5 Contrastive Theory of Rhetoric with the integration of relevant conceptual models of the LIWC Model of Psycholinguistic Domains (Pennebaker et al., 2015)3, Aristotelian Rhetoric (Aristotle & Kennedy, 1991)2 and Compositionality (Bulté & Housen, 2018)14, it was found that both rhetorical strategies were used frequently in both types of ENL and ESL research abstracts to reflect the appeal to logical mind of the writers. Contrastive analyses revealed that ESL demonstrate more frequencies of lexical and sentential units than the ENL research abstracts. However, ENL research abstracts were found to have more frequencies of nominal-numerical types of supporting details and lengthy complex sentences than the ESL research abstracts which may most likely point towards their lack of near-nativeness rhetoric in these two rhetorical strategies. In terms of the linguistic item which demonstrates the ESL near-nativeness rhetoric is the use of coordination as the rhetorical strategy as both groups of ENL and ESL research abstracts did not show any significant differences. This shows that ESL writers can still strive towards the rhetorical level of nativeness in the choice of their linguistic strategies in the writing of research articles. Future research recommendations are also shown at the end of the research.

Keywords: Contrastive Rhetoric, Rhetorical Appeal to Logos, Numerical-Nominal Data, Subordination, Coordination

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