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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 22:2 (2023) ► pp.225–244

In the name of the nobility of the cause, what I did is right

Legitimating the use of force via the hero-protector narrative used as argument

ORCID logo | Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University

Discourse-focused analyses of political communication show a complex interplay between narration and argumentation. Yet, current analytical tools fall short of accounting for the multifarious ways in which narratives perform as arguments. This paper adopts the notion narrative argument, developed in argumentation theory, to examine the ways the ‘hero-protector’ narrative serves as argument. The paper analyzes four speeches given by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, whereby the use of force on foreign grounds is justified via the ‘hero-protector’ narrative. The analytical framework combines the argumentation strategies of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) with pragma-dialectics’ argumentation schemes. The analysis shows that each narrative sequence constituting the ‘hero-protector’ narrative constructs specific argument schemes, and the logical connections between these sequences link arguments in chains to collectively justify the rightness of claims. The paper, thus, seeks to illustrate the possibility of conceptualizing narrative discourse as an effective way to argue for or against a claim.

Keywords: nobility of a goal argument scheme, hero-protector narrative, narrative argument, legitimation, discourse-historical approach, war rhetoric, narrative sequences
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Narratives in the DHA and argumentation theory
  • 3.Operationalizing the hero-protector narrative as argument
  • 4.Data and analysis
    • 4.1Current aggression sequence
    • 4.2Past aggression and past reaction sequences
    • 4.3Current reaction sequence
    • 4.4Future idealized end state sequence
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22066.eln
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