Developing a Rhetorical Model of Analysis of Allusion by Reference to Presidential American Debates

Allusion means that the speaker or writer refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance from an exterior context where the connection is inferred by the reader or the listener. Thus, it is termed a reference. Allusion positions the alluded text in a new context under which it undertakes new meanings and significations. However, it is impossible to encode the nature of all the new meanings and inter-textual patterns that an allusion produces. In Presidential American debated, the politicians tend employs this phenomenon extensively because they wants to make the utterances more persuasive in the context in which they occur. This work is intended to suggest a model to analyze this phenomenon in the Hillary/ Trump debates from a pragmatic perspective mentioning the main strategies utilized in this regard.


Developing a Rhetorical Model of Analysis of Allusion by Reference to Presidential American Debates Introduction
Allusion can't be evaluated just as a figure of speech, but, it is a structure with a certain pragma value, since it is frequently used in the contemporary public discourse, when the allusion has effect to orient the hearers' opinions towards what the alluders want to prompt. Therefore, different types of allusive language use may be amalgamated by family likenesses, displaying features as a complex net-work of similarities overlying and traversing (Wittgenstein 1958: 123). Bloom (1975: 126) points out that the modern meaning of implied, hidden or indirect reference represented shortly after the seventeenth century.
Actually, it doesn't mean that one meaning tersely stopped and was substituted by another, but rather, new senses of allusive use of language developed gradually and extended importance over older senses which intentionally fell into relinquishment .
As such, allusion is an integral component of the language mechanism explicitly as there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning at the term level, but rather possible nebulousness of meaning, and as one moves from the level of the term through to higher levels of phrase, clause and sentence meaning as there are ideal ways of conveying meanings in any language.
In a previous view, alluders (in this respect, politicians) utilize a number of linguistic strategies in an allusive situation that has been put forward by Blass (2005: 172) such as hyperbole, rhetorical question, omission, exaggeration, repetition, minimization, manipulation, figurative speech, emotional appeal, and connotative or substandard language. Accounting for his concepts, (ibid) alluders can affect the targets through "argumentation" so as to believe and do what the anterior want them to do .

Allusive Rhetorical Strategies
Rhetorical strategies encompass argumentation appeals and pragmatic figures of speech (i.e. Pragma-rhetorical Tropes). They are significant tools because of the unconventionality that describes rhetorical means united with pragmatic devices (O'Keefe, 1990: 30).

1-Argumentation Appeals of Allusion (Rhetorical appeals)
Like any shrewd presenter and as to get the best response from their audiences, politicians must know the bull's eye of audience and adjust their speech accordingly, and hence they will generate the products that they want.
Ethos, logos and pathos are all appeals that a politician should use for an operative argument. Each appeal is as vital as the others and too much of one is likely to produce an argument that audiences will either find considerable or not. In fact, each of the areas potentially affects the others because an illogical argument may evoke emotions, but the nonattendance of logic makes the audience think that there is nothing true or important to say.
An awesome emotional argument may lead to feel that the speaker can believe exclusively emotions rather than offering compact reasoning. On the other hand, too much use of facts and reasoning make the audience simply get bored.
Ethos refers to the alluder's ethics which is reflected in his authority, credibility and character in presenting his argumentation (klien(2015:1-3). Many times this appeal is how an alluder will make an argument "matter" to audiences.
These appeals are allusive in the sense that the alluder may use logic, authority or emotions to refer circuitously to certain individualities or concepts to create more convincing and effective argument.
Thus, during the third presidential debate between Hillary and Trump, Hillary often focuses her years of earlier experience in politics, law and government, while at the same time settling Trump's qualifications. Hence, she outstandingly remarked: 1-"On the day I was in the situation room monitoring the raid that brought Bin Laden to justice, he was hosting the Celebrity Apprentice." (3 rd .debate between Hillary & Trump in2016). She tells anecdotes ( saddening ones) of people and communities she met while on the campaign trail, she was keen to show her credibilityher ethos -of having actually gone out into the real world by restating these stories and speaking with individuals across America so as to identify what they really need from their political frontrunners, (Huckle, Belinda: 2017).
Clinton prefers to employ facts and figures during her campaign. Thus, she has peppered statistics and studied results throughout her speeches. For instance, during the first presidential debate, she used much of her time deafening Trump's planned policies relying on the basis of their direct negative economic consequences on the country. So she stated of Trump's tax plans:

2-"Independent experts have looked at what I've
proposed and looked at what Donald's proposed, and basically, they've said this: his tax plan… would blow up the debt over$5 trillion and would in some instances disadvantage middle class families, compared to the wealthy." (3 rd .debate between Hillary & Trump in 2016). Clinton utilizes the statistical information to criticize her opponent alluding to his grate failures in his own business. Roughly, feminist voters, who were inspired by the vision of having a female president for the first time in the country's history, might think that Clinton rarely uses pathos to illegitimate an emotional comeback from her voters, but, the fact is that any criticism must evoke negative feelings towards the addressee, (ibid).
Trump, on the other hand, uses the same tactic in similar way, consider the example below; 3-"Last year, we had almost $800 billion trade deficit. In other words, trading with other countries. We had an $800 billion deficit. It's hard to believe. Inconceivable", (2 nd . debate between Hillary & Trump in 2016). The allusion here is that there are very perilous issues must be discussed in the debate rather than the questions that are raised by the moderator. By providing the exact amount of trade deficit is a logical appeal used by trump to be more actual in changing the audience`s mind about the performance of the previous government..
Trump, on the other hand, intends to generate an emotional response from his followers through relying heavily on the pathos of rhetoric. Per se, slogans were recurrently shouted from his bookstand throughout his campaign like his now-famous; 4-"Make America Great Again", (1 st . debates between Hillary and Trump in 2016).
Trump here eludes to that the assumption on which he relies to construct his attractive program of the campaign which is "Obama and Hillary are behind all the problems in the country and the main problems in the world.

Pragma-Rhetorical Tropes
Tropes refer to a figurative language used for the sake of persuading. According to McQuarrie and Mick (1996), tropes provide hearers with flawed or equivocal information because they do not mean faithfully what they are through employing them into messages. Basically, hearers have to infer and decide the inconsistencies within the messages and assign the suitable independent meaning, (ibid: 88).
According to Hawkes (1972:1), figurative language is culturedependent because it constitutes a rhetorical code, and understanding this code is part of what it means to be a member of the culture in which it is utilized. Thus, figurative language is part of the reality preservation patterns of a culture or sub-culture. It is a code which relates apparently to how things are signified rather than to what is signified (Lakoff & Johnson 1980).
In a more recent work, McQuarrie and Phillips (2005: 96) divide tropes into substitution tropes and destabilization tropes. The former whose meanings is literally false, from which the offered meaning must be understood via plain substitution of intended for literal meaning is opposed to the latter in which the meaning is deciphered through larger cognitive effort.
In fact, the understanding of a substitution trope requires a replacement of utterance with the earlier meaning (Phillips 2000: 90). The intended meaning of destabilization tropes of allusion, on the other hand, is initially unclear. Otherwise, one must work to interpret it or select from multiple meanings the appropriate one in respect to the context in which the utterance occurs.

Destabilization Tropes of allusion
This type of tropes of the rhetorical process contains the use of an expression in which its' meaning is in its context. In the present study, some of these tropes are used as strategies of representing allusion in political debates. Namely, it comprises allusive pun, irony, metaphor, and metonymy.

2.1.1-Allusive Punning
Pun refers to wordplay which is expressed in vague uttered fun, orthographic idiosyncrasies, sounds and forms of the words, in flouting the grammar rules and other linguistic factors. It is controlled by the context in which the utterance occurs i.e. its pragmatic role is contented and actualized in a specific context (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2009). Augarde ( 2003) states that pun is seen as a synonymous linguistic units because the same sentence looks to suggest two selfgoverning meanings, but there are two different sentences consisting of different words tend claiming to be one because they are uttered by the same sounds.
Allusive punning is based on the vagueness that pun`s nature delivers. Vagueness is a convention of punning, but as Attardo (1994:133) argues, not every vague word establishes a pun. The pun needs a context to build upon, and be divergent to.

2.1.2-Allusive Irony
Allusive irony as Glucksberg and Brown, (1995) claim that main idea here is that irony is a reference to the expected but not employed situation. Ironic utterance is relevant to the context but unsuitable.
Thus, speaker must allude to help to make expectations for interpretation (Gibbs, 2007). Allusion in irony is associated to the insincerity of felicity conditions and the flouting of conversational maxims or the mixture of the two. This makes irony unfitting in the situation in which it occurs. For example; (5) "Are modeling an appropriate and positive behavior for today`s youth?" (2 nd .debate between Hillary and Trump in 2016). The irony here is related to the fact that all the next questions in the debate are about the bad behaviors or sayings of the two candidates. The utterance alludes to all the questions that will be raised in the debate.

2.1.3-Allusive metaphor and metonymy
Metaphor and metonymy are viewed as the two central modes of communicating meaning, and the source for much of our understanding in everyday life (Jakobson & Halle 1956;Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Hence, politicians tend to utilize them to allude to the massages they need to convey rather than say it unswervingly to make what they unfathomable, unforgettable and briefer. One may think that figurative language is likely a characteristic of as literary works , but, as Terry Eagleton points outs, 'there is more metaphor in Manchester than there is in Marvell' (Eagleton 1983, 6). Consider the example below; 6-"the ship ploughed the waves". Metaphor is used in the sense that understanding one type of thing can be in the light of the other (lakoff and Johnson, 1980:5). Thus, the ship does to the waves what a plough does to the ground (Turner, 1974:131). Metaphor is definitely context dependent since it has literal and symbolic meaning (ibid: 132). Allusive metaphor is not associated to the literal meaning of the identity, therefore; the interpreter must consult a group of hints and submissions. This means that allusive metaphor alludes not expresses, (ibid). Consider Trump`s metaphor; 7-"This is Medieval Times".
(1 st . debates between Hillary and Trump in 2016). This metaphor is used by Trump in the second debate (2016) to describe the world in the time of Obama. He alludes to the war, large number of victims which were significant marks of that period of time in the modern history.
Metonymy, on the other hand, means using indicating expressions rather direct referring to a particular referent. Metonymy and metaphor are different because the former has an intrinsic meaning while the latter has an allegorical meaning (Abdul-Raof: 2006:132). However, alludes always either to praise or dispraise implicit praise is more polite but implicit dispraise is impolite because allusion is more active that direct expressing of negative features or impersonations (ibid). 8-"Are you a teacher?" (3 rd . debates between Hillary and Trump in 2016).
The moderator asks Clinton here and Trump if they consider themselves a good example to follow by today`s youth. Clinton alludes to that teachers are interested in the young because of the nature of their job which is to directing them to be better persons.

2 Substitution Tropes of Allusion
The rhetorical operation of this type of tropes representing allusion, according to Vickers (1988: 4), is referred to be a selection of an expression that needs a fine-tuning by the message receiver so as to grip the intended meaning.
In this type of tropes, Fogelin (1988: 16) specifies that one says something other than what is meant and depend on the hearer to make the required alteration. Hence, when substituting an utterance by another on reflecting the intended meaning, an expression gains an unexpected or unconventional meaning. Therefore, "within destabilization, the meaning may go different, whereas in substitution it sways in a scale" (ibid).
In this study, three types of substitution tropes represented allusion can be specified via allusive rhetorical question, overstatement (hyperbole), understatement (litotes), and pragmatic ambiguity;

2.2.1-Allusive Rhetorical Questions
Rhetorical questions are interrogatives (open or closed) used for to highlight a central when no actual answer is probable. A rhetorical question may have a clear answer (Janoschke, 2004: 132).
Rhetorical questions allude to certain reply because the interpreter answers the question rendering to the context. Then, if the answer is yes/or no, the answer can be this or that. If the question is wh-question, the list of answers is longer. When the answer is not given directly, the clues in the context are exploited to generate an idea related to the question (van Emeren, 2009: 17). Consider the yes/no question and rhetorical question respectively, as in the previous example, 8-"Are you a teacher?" (3 rd . debates between Hillary and Trump in 2016).
The moderator asks Clinton here and Trump if they consider themselves a good example to follow by today`s youth. Clinton alludes to that teachers are interested in the young because of the nature of their job which is directing them to be better persons.
9-"lot of those nations are hearing what Donald says and wondering, why should we cooperate with the Americans?" (2 nd . debates between Hillary and Trump in 2016). Clinton alludes to Trump`s bad policy in dealing with the issue of terrorism because what he claims about ISIS makes many nations unwilling to cooperate with America to defeat terrorism. She employs a rhetorical question instead of assertion to refer to the idea that many nations will be affected negatively when hearing Trump`s statements and attitudes.

2.2.2-Allusive overstatement vs. understatement
Overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement (litotes) ar edefined as a kind of irony in which the literal meaning varies because the intended meaning is more or less (kane, 2008:229). The first stands for embellishing reality while the second refers to unstiffening it (ibid: 228). Consider the example below' 10-"I have a great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than me". (1 st . debates between Hillary and Trump in 2016). Trump in the second debate (2016) uses this overstatement to allude to the impossibility, as president, of hurting or humiliating American women as citizens.
Understatement evokes significance by seeming to deny. It is also divided into comic and serious in terms of how it ends. If it ends with laughter, it is comic, but if it ends with persuasion it is serious. However, it evokes an emotional impact by avoiding emotive language (ibid).

Conclusion
Allusion is one of the phenomena that are used in the electoral American campaigns for the sake of winning more voters. Rhetoric plays a vital role to represent this phenomenon linguistically via various strategies. These strategies are more persuasive and more effective to achieve the objectives of the electoral campaign.