Rhetoric and aesthetic theory postulate that utterances/texts engender affective and aesthetic effects which depend on their particular elaborations (tropes, rhetorical figures) as well as on semantics, syntax, phonetics and prosody of speech/writing. Up to this point, these effects have barely been explored empirically. The project examines them in both behavioural rating studies and neuropsychological measurements by systematically modifying the rhetorical, aesthetic and genre-specific features of texts.

The project integrates rhetorical theory, specific rhetorical analysis and variation, empirical collection of personal information and neuroscientific measurements with test subjects; in doing so, we aim to present a new multimethodic model integrating rhetoric, psycholinguistic and neuroscientific research.

One sub-project explores affectively and aesthetically operative qualities of texts, (1) in individual sentences (sententias), and (2) in entire political speeches. By systematically eliminating a number of rhetorical features from selected texts (e.g. homophonies, anaphors, metre), while keeping them semantically largely unaltered, we have created a material on the basis of which the effects of rhetoricity can be measured experimentally.

The second sub-project examines the influences of extra-textual information on the processing of short narrative or descriptive texts. We raise the question of whether the reader is influenced by information about the factuality or fictionality of a text even before starting to read, and observe the effects of such “reception contracts” between author and reader regarding affective and aesthetic processes in reading; we do so with the help of a paradigm specifically developed for this purpose.