Abstract

Plurifunctionality of rhetoric guaranteed its survival and promoted its renascence as modern discipline. There are four aspects of rhetoric to be pointed out: 1. rhetoric as the art of persuasive speech; 2. rhetoric as a doctrine ; 3. rhetoric as a descriptive apparatus; 4. rhetoric as a normative authority. The latter two aspects allow to define rhetoric as a secondary grammar and its function as that of a metatext. In the process by which a culture organizes itself the rhetorical text achieves the status of a metatext and thus comes into the same level as those texts through which a cultural system attempts to describe itself. Rhetoric describes and prescribes procedures for the construction of communicative forms and communicative situations in which speech is used for various purposes; that is, it takes on the task of making language functional. The dichotomous conception of language which rhetoric developed at its very beginning motivates the dichotomy between aesthetic and practical functions of language. Rhetoric as a secondary system with normative claims and internalized values becomes a decisive factor in the attempt of a culture to organize its lingual and communicative system, on the one had because of the deeply rooted dichotomy, on the other because of the tendency of rhetoric to build up a unified language with definite features and clear functions on the basis of the dichotomous scheme. Rhetoric as metatext, including its normative and descriptive functions, collapses in the 18th century, due to a new system of aesthetic values. The criticism of rhetoric is based on concepts of creativity and originality and a new evaluation of lingual questions. Thus the function of rhetoric as a stabilizing force is overthrown. The cultural context develops new decriptive systems with inherent normativity: stylistics, semantics, theory of literature, linguistic poetics, new rhetoric. The new disciplines retrace the path of rhetoric toward the stabilization of the unified language