The management of clarity and vagueness is a powerful political and ideological tool, as evidenced in diplomatic language. Vagueness may imply
mitigation, euphemism and indirectly denial. Hedging is useful when precise statements may be contextually inappropriate.
Halfway between semantics and rhetoric, there is one that well-known topoi. They are like topics as earlier defined, but they have become standardized and
publicized, so that they are typically used as ready-mades in argumentation. Topoi often serve as basic criteria in argumentation, since as standard arguments, they need
not be defended.
3. Formal Structures
Forms include sentence syntax, and overall schematic forms of discourse such as argumentative or narrative structures, a news article or a scholarly article in a
psychological journal. For example, emphasis can be given by placing something at the beginning of a news article. The same item can be de-emphasized by placing it
towards the end of the article or leaving it out entirely.
4. Sentence Syntax
Much of sentence syntax is not contextually variable, so not helpful when looking for ideological clues. Some places as ideological clues are: word order, active
and passive sentences, and nominalizations. For example, Words may be put up
front through so called topicalization, or they may be downgraded by putting them later in a clause or sentence, or leaving them out completely. Since syntactic parsing
is a fairly well understood area of computational linguistics, it might be reasonable to look for syntactic patterns that are out of the ordinary and see what words or concepts
are either emphasized or de-emphasized to provide clues to ideological point of view.
5. Discourse Form
Discourse form is the propositions at the level of the whole discourse. As with the expression of meanings in the sentence syntactic for which may be varied, at
this level propositions may be expressed in sentences that appear at the beginning of the discourse adding emphasis or near the end providing de-emphasis. So that one of
the many possible functions of sentence order in discourse can be ideological. It should be noted that sentences that express positive meanings about us, and negative
meanings about them, will typically appear up front -- if possible in headlines, leads, abstracts, announcements or initial summaries of stories. And conversely, meanings
that embody information that is bad for our image will typically tend to appear at the end, or be left implicit altogether.
6. Argumentation
