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Article published In:
Cognitive Perspectives on Genre
Edited by Carla Vergaro
[Pragmatics & Cognition 25:3] 2018
► pp. 602–630

Argumentation as a dimension of discourse

The case of news articles

| University of Trieste
| University of Trieste

The aim of this paper is to explore the status of argumentative discourse. We argue that argumentation can contribute to instances of different discourse genres, regardless of whether it is functional to their purposes. By analyzing examples from the daily press in the light of an approach to discourse analysis inspired by pragmatics, we show that also texts that are not expected to be argumentative have underlying argumentative structures and that a text’s being argumentative is a matter of degree: the understanding of underlying argumentative structures contributes to a varying extent to the understanding of what a text as a whole means and of its point in the speech situation. This role of argumentative structures in text understanding suggests considering argumentation as a cognitively-based dimension of discourse, connected to human rationality.

Keywords: argumentative discourse, argumentative rationality, discourse genre, implicature, presupposition, text understanding, Toulmin’s model of argument structure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1From the argumentative text type to argumentative genres, and beyond
    • 1.2A standard model of argument structures
    • 1.3Argumentation and reasoning
  • 2.The role of argumentative structures in text understanding
    • 2.1A clear-cut case of argumentative text
    • 2.2Argumentation in news articles
      • 2.2.1News comprising arguments
      • 2.2.2Speech events as news
      • 2.2.3News reporting actions
    • 2.3What our analyses show
  • 3.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18024.lab
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