ABSTRACT
Emotional appeals are ubiquitous in persuasive discourse. The construction and analysis of emotional appeals has, moreover, been a central part of rhetorical theory since antiquity. Nevertheless, without a method for analyzing how language can influence, arouse, or amplify emotions, emotional appeals pose a problem for contemporary analysts. This is due to their simultaneous linguistic, rhetorical, psychological, and emotion-arousing qualities. The author develops a method for analyzing emotional appeals by supplementing a classical Aristotelian model for understanding the emotional appeal – referred to here as the pathotic enthymeme – and interfacing it with work from cognitive semantics and emotion science. Specifically, he turns to the concept of frame metonymy, a cognitive process wherein a salient element of a frame provides conceptual access to part or the whole of a frame, thus allowing conceptualizers to form new inferences. He argues that this is precisely how pathotic enthymemes work at the lexical and discursive levels. By demonstrating how emotional appeals in post-2016 American political discourse work, he also underscores the indexical nature of emotional appeals, providing an explanation of how they work for different communities with different endoxa or conventional beliefs.
