Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2017

In this article it is shown that the institutional preconditions of the activity type adjudicating a freedom of speech case leave much room for strategic manoeuvring with topical selection. To this end, an analysis is presented of the argumentation of the District Court in a case against the Dutch anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders. In order to show the space for manoeuvring, this argumentation, resulting in acquittal, is compared with the argumentation put forward by the Court of Appeal, which had ordered, after the Public Prosecution Service’s refusal to do so, that Wilders be prosecuted. The analysis shows that the District Court made ample use of the space for manoeuvring provided at the normative level concerning the interpretation of legal rules and case law, and the space provided at the factual level of classifying the contested facts in light of the previously identified meaning of a rule.

In the framework of the extended pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting is approached in this study as a particular communicative activity type, which can be reconstructed as part of a critical discussion. CSR reports excerpts are viewed in the analysis as parts of a virtual critical discussion in which a company acts as a protagonist maneuvering strategically to defend the standpoint according to which the business is operated ethically, and to convince the audience about what is mentioned in the standpoint. The reconstructed standpoint of a CSR report, We are doing business responsibly, may be regarded as stereotypical, since it corresponds to the institutional point of this regulated type of communicative activity. In the first part of the study, a brief overview is given of the CSR reporting activity, then the concept of strategic maneuvering is presented, under its three aspects (topical potential, audience demand, and presentational techniques), as well as the notion of communicative activity type, with a highlight on the role of the (macro-)context and of institutional preconditions in analytical studies on argumentation. The analysis in the latter part of the study concerns presentational techniques used by the protagonist in the confrontation and in the argumentation stages in CSR reporting, in order to reconcile rhetorical and dialectical aims by maneuvering strategically. The coordinatively and the subordinatively compound structure of argumentation, the symptomatic argument scheme, as well as reformulations of the standpoint, use of emotionally endowed words, concentration of the arguments in the form of nominal sentences acting as headings are among the most important presentational devices constitutive of argumentative moves aimed at convincing the audience that the company acts ethically, but also at promoting a positive image of its business responsibility, which appears to be the ground for winning the discussion.

Corporate strategic communication has to be designed by considering multiple audiences of stakeholders. In this paper, we study the connection between the audience structure of corporate messages and the structure of the practical argumentation advanced to persuasively justify a business proposal. To this purpose, we combine a conceptual and analytical framework for the reconstruction of multiple audiences – the Text Stakeholders model ( Palmieri & Mazzali 2016 ), with a conceptual and analytical framework for the reconstruction of argument schemes – the Argumentum Model of Topics ( Rigotti & Greco Morasso 2010 ). A takeover proposal made by Ryanair for Aer Lingus is examined as an illustrative case in which this integrated framework is applied. We focus our analysis on Ryanair’s offer document to show how the particular structure of the audience is reflected in the selection of specific value and goal premises (endoxa) and in the activation of specific inferential relations (maxims) of practical reasoning.

This paper sets out to analyse a case study of adult-children interaction in an educational context from a perspective of argumentation. We select a case in which 3 argumentative discussions are opened and we analyse them with the aim of understanding whether they are fully developed from a point of view of argumentation; or whether they are cut short and why. Our focus is not on the children’s individual productions but on the process of interaction. We assume the pragma-dialectical model of argumentation and the AMT as a theoretical framework. Our findings show that none of the discussions opened gets to a concluding stage, either because the teacher shifts the discussion on a different issue, or because the opening stage is not clear, or because the argumentation stage is not adequately developed. These findings contribute to conceptual clarification about how to interpret the role of a teacher.

When engaging with each other, discussants navigate a complex set of communicative norms that aim at very different goals. Within argumentation theory naturally the most studied set of norms are those aiming at reasonableness, of which I take the pragma-dialectical rule set to be a representative example. They are however far from the only norms that guide communicative behavior. This paper offers an analysis of the areas of intersection and potential conflict of reasonableness (as understood by pragma-dialectics) with other communicative norms in general and rules of politeness (as presented by Geoffrey Leech) in particular.