Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 35, Issue 2, 2013

[This paper is a revised version of the farewell lecture of Peter Jan Schellens as a Professor of Language and Communication at the Faculty of Arts of Radboud University Nijmegen on January 11, 2013.] The high tone of voice in Dutch public and parliamentary debates is frequently criticised. However, what do we mean with a high ‘tone of voice’? This contribution uses a case study on wildlife starvation from 2010 to answer th Read More

In order to convince people of a claim persuasive arguments are important. Social psychological studies have shown that some arguments are more persuasive than others, but it is not clear what argument characteristics account for this difference. In search of a theory of argument quality this paper reviews different perspectives on argument quality. Cognitive psychological studies have uncovered such argument character Read More

The possible benefits and drawbacks of adding motivational elements to user instructions are discussed in several books and articles, but empirical research on this topic is scarce. We conducted two studies to examine the effects of two motivational elements aimed at increasing confidence: verification steps and motivational agents. These elements were added to the user instructions of a cell phone. These user instructions Read More

This article presents a brief review of commonly used fluency measures in writing research. These ‘traditional’ measures are complemented with fluency indicators derived from keystroke logging. The data were collected from an experiment with 80 students writing two descriptive texts, one in their mother tongue and one in their second language. This study provided information on new measures to describe fluency, taking Read More

Verbal irony has been studied in various academic disciplines such as linguistics, pragmatics, communication science and social psychology. However, due to the multidisciplinarity of the respective fields, each of these disciplines has developed its own irony literature. This paper discusses the current state of affairs of research into comprehension and rhetorical effects of verbal irony, with an emphasis on pragmatic aspect Read More