The Rhetoric of Propaganda: A Tagmemic Analysis of Selected Documents of the Cultural Revolution in China

by Xiao-Ming Yang

This book is a tagmemic analysis of propaganda discourse. With its primary concern on the social context of language, the tagmemic approach, developed by Pike, emphasizes the simultaneous description of social, interpersonal, and textual features of a text. The results of this study indicate that the tagmemic approach to language is a workable model for textual analysis. It can solve problems of textual analysis faced by both linguistics and traditional rhetoric. This unprecedented analysis of real time texts opens a new perspective for textual analysis, and the tagmemic theory proves to be promising in bridging the gap between linguistics and rhetoric.

138 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1995