ABSTRACT
As a way of demonstrating what is going on in a speech, explication is analogous to Hyman's description of Burke's mode: "Use All There Is to Use," which means "the rather disorganized organizing principle of investigating every possible line of significance." The personal value judgment—“a date which will live in infamy”—colors the appositive and introduces the future into the discussion. The passive allows the evidence to be offered in dependent clauses, which contain the signs upon which the conclusion depends; it provides the "distance" necessary to detached, intellectual analysis. Events of the more immediate past are handled differently; they are not in dependent clauses and the subject of detached, intellectual analysis. The passive voice of the initial announcement makes possible some specific relationships between time, the actors in time, and the judgmental aside about the time. Though the statement’s subject is the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan, in the passive voice the subject becomes a marginal.
