Argumentation And Language Linguistic Cognitive And Discursive Explorations

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar.

This book provides an in-depth look into the cognitive and argumentative nature of political discourse with a focus on the role and place of conceptual metaphors in practical argumentation. Neagu's empirical investigation centres on the corpus of the American Presidential debates in 2008 and speeches by Barack Obama from 2009-2011.

Featuring multidisciplinary and transcultural investigations, this volume showcases state-of-the-art scholarship about the impact of argumentation-based discourses and field-specific argumentation practices in a wide range of communities of practice belonging to the media, social, legal and political spheres. The investigations make use of integrative, wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and empirical research methodologies with a focus on argumentation strategies in real-life environments, both private and public, and in constantly growing virtual environments. This book brings together linguists, argumentation scholars, philosophers and communication specialists who convincingly show how interpersonal and/or intergroup interactions shape, challenge or change the argumentative practices of users, what argumentation skills and strategies become critical and consequential, how argumentative discourse contexts may stimulate or prevent critical reflection and debate, and what are the wider implications at personal, institutional and societal levels. Reaching beyond the boundaries of linguistics and argumentation sciences, this book should be a valuable resource for researchers as well as practitioners in the fields of pragmatic linguistics, argumentation studies, rhetoric, discourse analysis, political sciences and media studies.

A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. This book offers an innovative theoretical framework for analyzing, evaluating, and designing polylogues, understood as practices of managing disagreements among multiple positions, players, and places.

There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is not communication and communication is not language, why languages vary and how they evolved. Based on the most recent works in linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions that everyone has about language. Starting from false claims about language and languages, showing that language is not communication and communication is not language, the first part (Language and Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language, Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages. Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor, metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free indirect style. The reader, either specialist or amateur in language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what we know today about language and what we have yet to learn, sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next decades.

The ASLAN labex - Advanced studies on language complexity - brings together a unique set of expertise and varied points of view on language. In this volume, we employ three main sections showcasing diverse empirical work to illustrate how language within human interaction is a complex and adaptive system. The first section – epistemological views on complexity – pleads for epistemological plurality, an end to dichotomies, and proposes different ways to connect and translate between frameworks. The second section – complexity, pragmatics and discourse – focuses on discourse practices at different levels of description. Other semiotic systems, in addition to language are mobilized, but also interlocutors’ perception, memory and understanding of culture. The third section – complexity, interaction, and multimodality – employs different disciplinary frameworks to weave between micro, meso, and macro levels of analyses. Our specific contributions include adding elements to and extending the field of application of the models proposed by others through new examples of emergence, interplay of heterogeneous elements, intrinsic diversity, feedback, novelty, self-organization, adaptation, multi-dimensionality, indeterminism, and collective control with distributed emergence. Finally, we argue for a change in vantage point regarding the search for linguistic universals.