This article aims to provide a diachronic rhetorical profile of the annual American Memorial Day presidential speech as an example of epideixis, focusing on four sample texts selected from a corpus of 27 speeches and using the discourse historical approach as the primary mode of analysis. The function of epideixis in rhetoric is primarily aesthetic and affective, but this predominance can obfuscate ideological content in texts. Despite some variations between presidents, the article shows that, as a sub-category of the commemorative genre, Memorial Day speeches are relatively homogeneous in structure and style. The analysis locates the discursive role of the speech as a ‘field of action’ within the wider context of American political communication. Despite being thought of as a genre that is free of overtly political content, the Memorial Day corpus offers discrete snapshots of a nation’s self-image over time, but can also be viewed holistically.

Epideictic speeches have often tended to be overlooked in rhetorical studies as texts that are merely ornamental in nature and function; however, their apparent innocuousness may conceal a subtle, cumulative role in political persuasion and consensus-formation. This article discusses the rhetorical style of epideictic memorial speeches by American presidents. Drawing on rhetorical scholars from Aristotle to Jakobson and Burke, the author considers the poetic function of language. In epideixis, there is a strong rhetorical integration of text, audience, performance and environment. Even in prosaic political contexts, language can be deployed poetically, and linguistic choices by political speakers contribute to the evaluation by the audience of a speaker's charisma. Using memorial speeches as an example of literary/non-literary hybridity, the author observes that the key persuasive element in epideixis is its poetic predictability.

This paper describes selected outcomes of media monitoring for anti-minority hate speech in the Czech Republic. In keeping with the agenda of critical discourse analysis, we aim to integrate historical, linguistic and cultural specificities with their linguistic manifestations in news articles about minorities, and here we present findings from a long-term study devoted to tracking xenophobia against two of the main minority groups. The AntiMetrics project, of which the work described here is one part, is designed to detect signs of anti-minority rhetoric in a society, with a view to taking steps to prevent such indicators from developing into more embedded prejudice and ultimately inter-group violence. The paper aims to provide a snapshot of what is a broad, long-term interdisciplinary project. Using a critical discourse toolkit, we analyse a sample news story about the Roma community, and identify a number of discursive and linguistic features that indicate the entrenchment of “new racism” in media at some levels. The toolkit also seeks to go beyond lexical signs to identify more implicit rhetorical devices, such as framing and (de-)contextualization of news events, and to quantify lack of balance in the selection of witnesses and other primary definers. Our ongoing content survey indicates the embedding of linguistic patterns that raise concern about leakage of far right discourse via media into everyday communication.