The Concept of ‘Rhetoric’ in a Linguistic Perspective: Historical, Systematic, and Theoretical Aspects of Rhetoric as Formal Language Usage

Rhetoric is commonly known as an old discipline for the persuasive usage of language in linguistic communication acts. In this article we examine the concept ‘rhetoric’ from 1. the diachronic perspective of historical linguistics showing that the concept ‘rhetoric’ is linguistically present in various Indo-European roots and exists across several language families and 2. the theoretical perspective towards the concept ‘rhetoric’ with a contemporary defi nition and model in the tradition of rhetorical theory. The historical and systematic approaches allow us to describe the features of the conceptualization of ‘rhetoric’ as the process in theory and empirical language history. The aim of this article is a formal description of the concept ‘rhetoric’ as a result of a theoretical process of this conceptualization, the rhetorization, and the historical documentation of the process of the emergence of the concept ‘rhetoric’ in natural languages. We present as the concept ‘rhetoric’ a specifi c mode of linguistic communication in ‘rhetoricized’ expressions of a natural language. Within linguistic communicative acts ‘rhetoricized language’ is a process of forming structured linguistic expressions. Based on traditional rhetorical theory we will in a case study present ‘formalization,’ ‘structuralization,’ and ‘symbolization’ as the three principle processes, which are parts of this process of rhetorization in rhetorical theory.