Rhetoric and the Body: A Lesson from the Ancient Elocutionists

Intonation is different from most of the other tools for communication studied by rhetoricians and linguists, because it has more in common with gesture than with semantic contents or grammatical forms. Nevertheless, both gesture and intonation are important 'to' any linguistic performance. Our 'ancestors' in these reflections may be found among the so-called Elocutionists: the group includes all those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and then American scholars who concentrated on the study of voice management and elocution. The contribution underlines the historical and theoretical value of the American Elocutionary movement.