Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Enthymemic Invention and Structural Prediction

1980; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 41; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/375907

2161-8178

Lawrence D. Green,

Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

THE FORCE OF ENTHYMEMES in argumentative writing has always been recognized, but their function in discourse in general has been recognized less frequently. The enthymeme (or syllogism) is a controlling presence in all sorts of discourse, even though we are often not aware of its presence until it somehow calls attention to itself, as with our objection That doesn't make sense! It is hardly possible to conduct a coffee conversation of unplanned discourse without resorting to probabilistic reasoning, just as expository or narrative writing will rarely go for more than a few sentences before drawing relations from probability (It was winter, and I knew the bear was asleep). Even billboards demonstrate the pervasiveness of enthymemic reasoning at all levels of our society: Nobody likes to fight, but somebody has to know how. The Marines are looking for a few good men. The formal complexities of this statement will entertain a rhetorician for hours, but, for the Marines' ideal reader, it takes no more than the changing of a traffic light for him to respond. Enthymemic reasoning runs throughout all discourse so completely that we are apt to see right through it and to follow the way it patterns our thought without being conscious of the patterning itself. But while probabilistic reasoning pervades all our discourse, its effects are usually only local effects. The mark of argumentation, on the other hand, is that there will be one or more enthymemes which control the structure of an entire piece of discourse. Underlying any piece of argumentation there will be a fundamental enthymeme which shapes the movement of the entire discourse through its control of the overall logical and rhetorical relations within the discourse. This structural enthymeme need not be stated explicitly in the writing, and, for that matter, many a competent writer would be surprised to see his or her own controlling enthymeme demonstrated. As with local enthymemes, structural enthymemes are so everpresent that we are apt not to see them. But if the prose intends to convey an idea in a reasoned manner, a controlling enthymeme will always be present. It is this underlying enthymeme, whether stated or not, which provides the writer with a sense of logical necessity throughout the entire discourse.