Retrieving argumentative patterns in UK prime ministerial debates
Chiara Degano | Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”
This paper explores the viability of a synergy between corpus linguistics and the study of argumentation in context. While quantitative approaches to the study of discourse have been profitably integrated at the levels of lexico-grammar and syntax, more rarely has this been the case for higher levels of analysis such as argumentative structures. Such an approach would help identify those recurring patterns of argumentation that build up cumulatively, and which can only be identified in larger samples of discourse. In particular this paper concerns how the tools of corpus linguistics can be put to use for the analysis of strategic manoeuvring, and especially topical selection. In order to do so, the televised prime ministerial debates held on the occasion of the 2010 general election in the UK will be taken as a case study, with a focus on the use of linguistic indicators that might help retrieve argumentative patterns.
Baker, Paul. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London/New York: Continuum.
Benoit, William L. 2003. “Presidential Campaign Discourse as a Causal Factor in Election Outcome.” Western Journal of Communication 671: 97–112.
Benoit, William L. 2007. Communication in Political Campaigns. New York: Peter Lang.
Benoit, William L., and William T. Wells. 1996. Candidates in Conflict: Persuasive Attack and Defense in the 1992 Presidential Debates. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Benveniste, Émile. 1966. Problèmes de lingàstique generale. Paris, Gallimard; It. transl., 1971. Problemi di linguistica generale. Milano, Il Saggiatore.
Bishop, George F., Robert G. Meadow, and Marilyn Jackson-Beeck (eds). 1980. The Presidential Debates: Media, Electoral, and Policy Perspectives. New York: Praeger.
Carlin, Diana B., and Mitchell S. McKinney (eds). 1994. The 1992 Presidential Debates in Focus. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Degano, Chiara. 2007. “Presupposition and Dissociation in Discourse: A Corpus Study.” Argumentation 211: 361–378.
Degano, Chiara. 2008. Discorsi di guerra: il prologo del conflitto iracheno nella stampa britannica e italiana. Milano: LED Edizioni Universitarie.
Degano, Chiara. 2010. “Indicators of Argumentation in Arbitration Awards: A Diachronic Perspective.” In The Discourses of Dispute Resolution, ed. by Vijay K. Bhatia, Christopher N. Candlin, and Maurizio Gottiin. 189–205. Bern: Peter Lang.
Degano, Chiara. 2012a. “Arguments by Analogy in Arbitration Awards.” In Arbitration Awards: Generic Features and Textual Realisations, ed. by Vijay K. Bhatia, Giuliana Garzone, and Chiara Degano, 138–151. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Degano, Chiara. 2012b. Discourse Analysis, Argumentation Theory and Corpora. An Integrated Approach. Milano: Arcipelago Edizioni.
Degano, Chiara. 2014. “Genre Variation in Electoral Campaigns: Adaptation to the Audience in UK Posters and TV Debates.” In Evolution in Genres: Emergence, Variation, Multimodality, ed. by Paola Evangelisti Allori, Vijay K. Bhatia, and John A. Bateman, 327–355. Bern: Peter Lang.
Firth, John R. 1957/1968. “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-55.” In Studies in Linguistic Analysis (special volume of the Philological Society), Oxford, The Philological Society: 1–32; reprinted in Palmer, F. R. (ed.), Selected Papers of J. R. Firth 1952-59, London, Longman: 168-205.
Flowerdew, Lynne. 2011. “Corpus Based Critical Discourse Analysis.” Paper presented at the
Corpus Linguistics 2011, conference
, ICC Birmingham, 20-22 July.
Friedenberg, Robert V. (ed). 1994. Rhetorical Studies of National Political Debates, 1960-1992. New York: Praeger.
Garzone, Giuliana, and Francesca Santulli. 2004. “What can Corpus Linguistics do for Critical Discourse Analysis?” In Corpora and Discourse, ed. by Alan Partington, John Morley, and Louann Haarman, 351–368. Bern: Peter Lang:
Halliday, Michael A.K. 1994 [1985]. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Hellweg, Susan A., Micheal Pfau, and Robert B. Steven. 1992. Televised Presidential Debates: Advocacy in Contemporary America. New York: Praeger.
Hinck, Edward A. 1993. Enacting the Presidency: Political Argument, Presidential Debates, and Presidential Character. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Jamieson, Kathleen H., and David S. Birdsell. 1988. Presidential Debates: The Challenge of Creating an Informed Electorate. New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Danette I. 2005. “Feminine Style in Presidential Debate Discourse, 1960-2000.” Communication Quarterly 53 (1): 3–20.
Kraus, Sidney. 2000. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy, 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Mayer, Michael A., and Diana B. Carlin1994. “Debates as a Voter Education Tool.” In The 1992 Presidential Debates in Focus, ed. by Diana B. Carlin and Mitchell S. McKinney, 127–138. New York: Praeger.
Mazzi, Davide. 2007. “The Construction of Argumentation in Judicial Texts: Combining a Genre and a Corpus Perspective.” Argumentation 211: 21–38.
Mazzi, Davide. 2012, “Analogy in History. A Corpus-Based Study.” In Exploring Argumentative Contexts, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen, 115–133. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Wilson. 1996. Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Minow, Newton N., and Craig L. LaMay. 2008. Inside the Presidential Debates - Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mochales, Raquel, and Aagie Ieven. 2009. “Creating an Argumentation Corpus: Do Theories Apply to Real Arguments? A Case Study on the Legal Argumentation of the ECHR.” In
Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
. New York: ACM.
O’Halloran, Kieran A. 2009. “Implicit Dialogical Premises, Explanation as Argument: A Corpus-Based Reconstruction.” Informal Logic 29 (1): 15–53.
Partington, Alan, John Morley, and Louann Haarman (eds). 2004. Corpora and Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.
Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press (trans.). [1958. Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhetorique, Presses Universitaires de France].
Reed, Chris. 2006. “Preliminary Results from an Argument Corpus.” In Linguistics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Eloína M. Bermúdez and Leonel R. Miyares, 185–196. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Rocci, Andrea. 2009. “Modalities as Indicators in Argumentative Reconstruction.” In Pondering on Problems of Argumentation, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen, 207–228. Dordrecht: Springer.
Rubinelli, Sara. 2009. Ars Topica: The Classical Technique of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero. Dortdecht: Springer.
Sala, Michele. 2008. “Argumentative Styles as Cultural Identity Traits in Legal Studies.” In Identity Traits in English Academic Discourse, ed. by Davide S. Giannoni and Stefania Maci, Special issue of Linguistica e Filologia, 271: 93–113.
Santulli, Francesca. 2010. “Costruire il mito fra l’enunciazione e la performatività: Obama et alii.” In Visione politica e strategie linguistiche, ed. by Donatella Montini, 65–77. Roma: Rubettino.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schroeder, Alan. 2000 [2008]. Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scott, Mike. 2004. Wordsmith Tools 4. Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, John. 2004. Trust the Text. Language, Corpus and Discourse. Oxon: Routledge.
Stubbs, Michael. 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst. 1992. Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragmadialectical Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst. 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation. The Pragmadialectical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Rob Grootendorst, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2002. Argumentation: Analysis, Evaluation, Presentation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter Houtlosser. 2002. “Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse: Maintaining a Delicate Balance.” In Dialectic and Rhetoric. The Warp and Woof of Argumentation Analysis, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser, 131–159. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter Houtlosser. 2006. “Strategic Maneuvering: A Synthetic Recapitulation.” Argumentation 201: 381–392.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Peter Houtlosser, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2007. Argumentative Indicators in Discourse: A Pragmadialectical Study. Dordrecht: Springer.
van Rees, M. Agnes. 2005. “Indicators of Dissociation.” In Argumentation in Practice, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser, 53–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Walton, Douglas, Chris Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno. 2008. Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Žagar, Igor Ž. 2007. “Arguing from Large Corpora: Some Epistemological and Methodological Dilemmas; Experimental Study Aimed at Quantifying Political Argumentation.” In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren, J. Anthony Blair, Charles A. Willard, and Bart Garssen, 1553–1558. Amsterdam: SicSat.
Zarefsky, David. 2009. “Strategic maneuvering in political argumentation.” In Examining Argumentation in Context: Fifteen Studies on Strategic Maneuvering, ed. by Frans H. van Eemeren, 115–130. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Santulli, Francesca & Chiara Degano
2022. Agreement: An Argumentation Perspective. In Agreement in Argumentation [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 31], ► pp. 27 ff.
Serakioti, Dimitra & Petros Stefaneas
2022. Ambiguity in Argumentation: The Impact of Contextual Factors on Semantic Interpretation. Studia Humana 11:3-4 ► pp. 18 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.