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Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 294] 2018
► pp. 85–119

Pragmatics vs rhetoric

Political discourse at the pragmatics-rhetoric interface

| Strömstad Academy, Sweden

Pragmatics and rhetoric display a range of commonalities and convergences in that both are concerned with discursive and extra-discursive strategies that enable the negotiation and re-negotiation of context-situated meaning, and the co-performance of interpersonal and institutional relationships in terms of intentions and expectations. At the same time, while pragmatics and rhetoric display differences in analytical focus, they complement each other, through specific insights into, e.g., interactive uses of addressing forms and goal-oriented speech acts (pragmatics) and figurative language use and argumentation processes (rhetoric). The aim of this chapter is to explore the interface between pragmatics and rhetoric, arguing that a pragma-rhetorical approach provides systematic tools for a multi-level analysis of discursive contextualisation of political power struggle and of metadiscursive framing of question-answer political confrontation.

Keywords: pragmatics, rhetoric, pragma-rhetoric, political discourse, metadiscourse, political interview, parliamentary debate, argumentation, contextualization, rhetorical appeal
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Target of the present study
  • 3.Pragmatics and rhetoric revisited
    • 3.1The pragmatics-rhetoric interface
    • 3.2Interfacing the pragmatics and the rhetoric of political discourse
  • 4.Pragma-rhetorical approach to political discourse
    • 4.1Contextualisation through meaning negotiation and re-negotiation in political interviews
    • 4.2Metadiscourse framing strategies in question-answer sequencing in parliamentary debates
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 7 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.294.05ili
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