Old Is the New New: The Rhetoric of Anchoring Innovation

Abstract

In life, language, and argument, we need to feel at home. “Anchoring” connects whatever seems “new” to what is considered familiar. This paper studies the argumentative use of “anchoring” in the wider context of its role in language use. “Anchoring” provides a unifying perspective in analyzing linguistic and rhetorical elements identified by different schools of thought (Sect. 2). Several features of language, elsewhere studied in the context of “discourse linguistics”, direct the addressee on how to anchor new information to the common ground. Categorizing, labeling and naming (topics from philosophy and psychology) can be considered anchoring functions. And formal linguistic iconicity anchors linguistic representations in evolutionarily older senso-motor systems. Section 3 discusses the anchoring effects of some specific discourse types: genealogy, mythology, aetiology, and etymology. All of these frequently take the form of narrative and are used in affective, “engaged” argumentation. Finally, the rhetorical and argumentative implications of the terminology of “new” and “old” itself are discussed, and one specific “anchoring trope” is analyzed, which sets up an anchor as a reference point for something new: the phrase “X is the new Y” (Sect. 4).