Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2017

Within the framework of Pragma-Dialectics, this article analyzes personal attacks in the spokespersons’ replies at the press conferences held by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 2012 and 2015. The research results show that, to cut down the credibility of their opponents in attempting to dismiss them, spokespersons adopt three subtypes of personal attack: the direct, the indirect, and the You too subtypes. Each of them can be further divided into several variants. Taking account of the institutional preconditions for making argumentative replies at governmental press conferences, this article analyzes how spokespersons maneuver strategically in attacking a secondary audience by means of the various subtypes and variants of personal attack. It then explains how these strategic maneuvers assist the spokespersons in convincing their primary audience.

To explore an argumentative approach to governmental crisis communication, this research adopts the pragma-dialectical framework to analyze and evaluate a local Chinese government’s crisis discourse concerning disputes over a proposed chemical project. The discourse is collected from the popular local online forum Mengxi Forum. By reconstructing from the discourse the four stages of a critical discussion, analyzing the embedded strategic maneuverings and evaluating the argumentation in view of institutional preconditions, it is shown that in its use of co-ordinative argumentation structures and causal argument schemes, the local government’s crisis discourse is not dialectically reasonable enough to convince the other stakeholders of the necessity to implement the proposed project. The results also shed some light on the necessity for governments’ crisis information management to ensure in its crisis discourse both dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness.

This paper aims to explore the use of persuasive definition in a corporate weblog by examining how a blogger attempts to define the company’s role in response to criticisms in the cyber space. Making use of a pragma-dialectical research framework, corporate weblog is characterized as an argumentative activity type in the commercial domain in which the legitimacy of persuasive definition is contextually constrained. The paper first analyzes the institutional preconditions that restrict all the argumentative moves in a corporate weblog, and then investigates how the corporate blogger of Taobao, the biggest online shopping website in China, responds to criticism by redefinition to evade the burden of proof.

The present study analyzes the strategic maneuvering in the Lin Dan Commercial (LDC), an anti-corruption advertisement broadcasted on China Central Television, with the help of pragma-dialectics and conceptual metaphor theory. In order to evaluate the LDC’s reasonableness and effectiveness, this research aims to establish how an argument by multimodal metaphor is used in practice for disseminating of an anti-corruption view. A pragma-dialectical analysis is provided of the LDC advertisement viewed as a multimodal metaphor. According to the research, the LDC advertisement multimodally contains a conceptual metaphor, career is a match, to enhance the advertisement’s effectiveness by maneuvering strategically. In this endeavor, a sense of identity created by the multimodally-expressed conceptual metaphor is utilized to ensure its reasonableness.