Introduction

This special issue aims to explore the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of meaning in terms of their significance and relevance in the study of argumentation. Accordingly, the contributors to the project, who have all presented their work during the 2nd Argumentation and Language conference, which took place in Lugano in February 2018,1 have been specifically instructed to produce papers which explicitly tackle the importance of the study of meaning for that of argumentative practices. All papers therefore cover at least one aspect of this complex relationship between argumentation and meaning, which contributes to delivering a state-of-the-art panorama on the issue. Drawing from computational linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, the contributions to this special issue will illuminate how the study of meaning in its different forms may provide valuable insights for the study of people’s argumentative practices in different contexts, ranging from the political to the private sphere. This introductory discussion tackles specific aspects of the intricate relationship between pragmatic inference and argumentative inference – that is, between meaning and argumentation –, provides a brief survey of existing interfaces between the study of meaning and that of argumentation, and concludes with a presentation of the contributions to this special issue.

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Argumentation and meaning

Oswald

Greco

Miecznikowski

et al. 2020

JAIC

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Characteristics of a detached argumentative style in public policy analysis

Gâţă

2021

JAIC

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This study is a contribution to the recently introduced notion of argumentative style (van Eemeren 2019) in the framework of the pragma-dialectical approach. It aims at characterizing a detached argumentative style, by focusing on a speech event pertaining to the communicative activity type organizational discourse, a report on EU environment and climate change policies. The analysis concerns the executive summary and the key findings of the report, reconstructed in the analysis as the concluding stage of the critical discussion corresponding to the pragma-dialectical model. The notion of text type (Adam 1992) used in the analysis has allowed a more fine-grained characterization of the detached argumentative style, especially since the communicative practice under analysis displays a specific discourse format and structure for reasons of conventionalization and institutionalization. In such circumstances, determined by the type of conventionalization imposed by the context, the adoption of a detached argumentative style appears to be a pre-requisite. In the concluding stage of a critical discussion the difference of opinion is not restated, while the most significant standpoints are synthetically (re)presented by an adequate balance of narrative, descriptive and metadiscursive text strategies meant to support the objectivity, the conciseness of the presentation and also ensuring the necessary density of information required in a report summary or the presentation of key findings, respectively. While explicit negative evaluations or formulations of standpoints are avoided, the recommendations are presented as open to adoption or reconsideration by policymakers.

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Persuasive Effects of Linguistic Agency Assignment and Linguistic Markers of Argumentation in Health Messages about an Emerging Sexually Transmitted Disease

Coppola

McGlone

Girandola

et al. 2019

Journal of Health Communication

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Introduction

Cited by 4 publications

References 50 publications

Argumentation and meaning

Argumentation and meaning

Characteristics of a detached argumentative style in public policy analysis

Persuasive Effects of Linguistic Agency Assignment and Linguistic Markers of Argumentation in Health Messages about an Emerging Sexually Transmitted Disease

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