Domenec, Fanny and Resche, Catherine, eds. (2020): Stratégies et techniques rhétoriques dans les discours spécialisés. Berlin/Bern: Peter Lang, 248 p.

As the title states, the nine studies presented here focus on how rhetoric is exploited in specialised discourse. The editors’ introduction starts off with a very useful brush-up course on just what rhetoric is all about, going back to Aristotle and his advice on adapting a text, written or spoken, to a given audience. The viewpoints on the legitimacy of rhetoric since Antiquity are then sketched out as is its place in contemporary discourse analysis. The aim of the book is to demonstrate explicitly how Aristotle’s famous trinity, ethos, logos and pathos, are used in specialised or semi-specialised discourse situations, a brief which all the contributors take to heart. In doing this, they not only show how rhetoric is relevant to LSP but also contribute significantly to genre studies. As Resche puts it: “Depuis Aristote, rhétorique et genre sont étroitement liés, en fonction du but que chaque genre est censé poursuivre […]” (p. 116). The result is a well-coordinated series of studies demonstrating how a rhetorical approach can contribute to accounting for textual genres. In spite of the French text, most of the studies included are on English, exclusively for seven of them with one each for French alone and French compared with English. Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet and Shirley Carter-Thomas are well known for their studies on a number of important academic discourse genres, some mainstream, such as oral delivery of conference papers, others unjustly neglected such as lab notes, and others still about how the same content can move across genres, for example how a scientific experiment migrates from lab notes to a research article (Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas 2016). The present paper focuses on a relatively new genre, the three-minute presentation of a thesis project, which these authors have already published on in connection with new academic discourses on the Internet (Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas 2019). This chapter, which will be presented here in some detail as it announces those to come, is explicitly structured on an analysis of the three components of classical rhetoric mentioned above: logos, the motivated argument behind the thesis; pathos, putting the audience on the side of the thesis-candidate and ethos, where the credibility is constructed in and by the discourse. Looking in detail shows logos taking the form of move analysis: eight moves, of which two prove optional and three essential: motivation, objectives and implications. Pathos is particularly important in the exordium and the different methods of achieving this—including many non-verbal forms—are identified before going on to investigate other manifestations, in particular the use of humour. Ethos here takes the form of “street cred,” ploys used by the speakers to connect with and gain the sympathy of their supposed audiences. Indeed, the accommodations made for an audience, which is very different from that of a thesis defence or a conference paper, can be broken down into as many rhetorical moves. But the study in terms of rhetoric is not just an analytical tool, it is also diagnostic, leading the researchers to question the validity of this new genre in the academic context. Is the mastery of the three-minute thesis presentation really a skill which will serve PhD students in their academic career? In the second chapter, Geneviève Bordet also uses rhetoric to follow up on the analysis of an academic genre which had not been given the attention it deserves either, namely the thesis abstract. The line of investigation follows those language markers that indicate the components of narrative scenarios found in a corpus of 30 abstracts, half from the didactics of mathematics, half from materials science, all written by native English speakers. The analysis …