Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013

This study examined audience perceptions of a political candidate’s credibility and likeability as a function of varying the candidate’s responses to an opponent’s nonverbal disparagement during a televised debate. 412 participants watched a purported televised debate between candidates for mayor in a small city in Utah. In all six versions, one debater engaged in strong nonverbal disagreement during his opponent’s opening statement. His opponent responded to the nonverbal behavior with one of six decreasingly polite messages. Results indicated that more direct (i.e., less polite) messages increased audience perceptions of the speaker’s expertise and character compared to providing no response. The results also showed a significant interaction between response type and audience member’s level of trait verbal aggressiveness. The “indirect” and “on-record with redress” responses led to stronger perceptions of speaker composure and extroversion for members high in verbal aggression and the “off the record” strategy led to higher perceptions of extroversion and composure for members low in verbal aggression.

This paper investigates variation in argumentative discourse as a consequence of the passage from traditional linear texts to hypertext, focusing in particular on NGOs’ campaigning on the web. The analysis, which combines linguistic and argumentation theory perspectives (drawing for the latter on the pragmadialectical approach), addresses issues connected with the loss of linearity determined by hypertexts, with special regard for its impact on textual coherence, and the consequential loss of the writer’s control on the order of arguments (dispositio).

This paper is a report of a pilot study of how candidates argue when they are running for political office. The election studied was the provincial election in Ontario, Canada, in the fall of 2011. Having collected about 250 arguments given during the election from newspaper media, we sought answers to the following questions, among others: (i) which argumentation schemes have the greatest currency in political elections? (ii) Is a list of the best known argumentation schemes sufficient to classify the arguments given in elections? (iii) What schemes should be added to the familiar list to make it more adequate for studying elections? (iv) Is it useful to classify arguments as being used for positive, policy-critical, person-critical and defensive purposes? (v) Can political parties be usefully characterized by noting their preferred kinds of arguments and their most frequent uses of arguments? (vi) What lessons can be learned from this study to better design future studies of the same kind?