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Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations

Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth?) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what tha...

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Autores principales: Neitsch, Jana, Niebuhr, Oliver
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9579077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35597852
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09874-8
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author Neitsch, Jana
Niebuhr, Oliver
author_facet Neitsch, Jana
Niebuhr, Oliver
author_sort Neitsch, Jana
collection PubMed
description Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth?) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how, i.e., the RQs’ prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how. Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it?). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations—previously found for German RQs and ISQs—meet the listeners’ expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device.
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spelling pubmed-95790772022-10-20 Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations Neitsch, Jana Niebuhr, Oliver J Psycholinguist Res Article Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth?) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how, i.e., the RQs’ prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how. Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it?). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations—previously found for German RQs and ISQs—meet the listeners’ expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device. Springer US 2022-05-21 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9579077/ /pubmed/35597852 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09874-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
spellingShingle Article
Neitsch, Jana
Niebuhr, Oliver
Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations
title Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations
title_full Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations
title_fullStr Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations
title_full_unstemmed Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations
title_short Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations
title_sort research on rhetorical devices in german: the use of rhetorical questions in sales presentations
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9579077/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35597852
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09874-8
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