2010 Conference: Abstracts

To find an abstract of a conference paper, please click on the letter that the surname of the paper’s (first) author begins with.

Igor Ž. Žagar (Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana & Unuversity of Maribor, Maribor)

Topoi and critical discourse analysis (CDA)

Topos (topoi in pl.) is one of the most widly used concepts from classical argumentation theory (Aristotle, Cicero). It found its way not only in philosophy, sociology, anthropology and linguistics (where especially the major part of work done by Anscombre and Ducrot is devoted to the notion of topos/topoi), it found its way in everyday life and everyday conversation as well. In this presentation, I would like to examine the role that topoi play in Critical Discourse Analysis. Starting with definitions from Aristotle and Cicero, contrasting them with new conceptualisations by Perelman and Toulmin, and examining the superficial use in everyday conversation, I will try to show that Critical Discourse Analysis relies mostly on simplified, unreflected use of topoi (as found in everyday use), thus neglecting the (much more productive) theoretical foundations and analytical scope of the concept.

Maria Załęska (University of Warsaw, Warsaw) Katarzyna Budzyńska (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw)

Against authority. Strategies of being irreverent

The main topic of the study are the ways in which the argument ex auctoritate and the appeal to the expert opinion are refuted. The theoretical approach is inspired by Walton’s (1998) research on the appeal to expert opinion. The paper proposes a typology of the ways in which the authority in the broad sense is being undermined. The systematization, based on case studies, embraces both interpersonal level (including ad hominem) and the factual one. The proposed systematization combines the criteria such as the type of authority (e.g. epistemic, deontic), the ways of attacking it (e.g. undercuts or rebuttals, often intertwined with emotive means) and the parameters of the communicative situation.

David Zarefsky (Northwestern University, Evanston)

The appeal for transcendence: A possible response to deep disagreement

Most theorists of argumentation acknowledge that an underlying stratum of agreement is essential for a productive argument.  Typical examples of such agreements concern the goals of the encounter, what counts as evidence, and norms of procedure.  Situations in which there are no shared understandings are referred to sometimes as “deep disagreement.”  How can argumentation proceed in such a case?  One possible maneuver may be to transcend the original conflict by shifting the dispute onto a different plane.  This may involve a surrogate dispute that substitutes for the original one, or it may involve seeing the same dispute through a different lenses, or it may involve appealing to an external value such as urgency or shared history.  Theorizing about these possibilities will be supplemented by case studies drawn mostly from U.S. politics as well as a personal example.  The paper will assess the utility of these strategies.

Claudia Zbenovich (Hadassah College, Jerusalem)

“Diet or Die!” Persuasive strategies in health coaching discourse

In Israeli culture, healthy eating is presented as an acceptable and necessary practice and a natural life-long preoccupation for all. Paradoxically, people seem to be very confused about changing their intrinsic food habits towards embracing weight loss, wellness and good health. This could be traced to a discursive gap between everyday practices within which our eating habits are located, and an infinite societal ambition for the perfect body, that symbolizes self-control, success and acceptance. To address this gap, there is a strong tendency for particularly forceful linguistic apparatus that emphasizes initiating change in eating habits. In this respect, the discourse analysis of the group interaction in diet classes provides a useful analytic tool to reveal the verbal patterns used by the diet coaches. It also exhibits how these practices govern the adherence of the participants of the groups to the system of newly acquired values. 

Gábor Zemplén (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest) & Gergely Kertész (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest)

Strategic maneuvering before even saying a word

Our paper is an attempt to plug social psychological insights into the pragma-dialectical model. We address in particular the question of what maneuvering potential initial responses and interpretation of utterances have, by incorporating perspectives from the so-called Causal Attribution Theory. This theory makes it possible to analyse the way people are dealing with speech acts, where the motivations or intentions of a communicator are important factors in the interpretation. As psychological framing influences the understanding of utterances,  the preparation for framing might be an important part of strategic maneuvering. This framework has the potential to contribute to the pragma-dialectical model by addressing recent debates (like the one triggered by Kimball on the ad baculum fallacy) on the demarcation of certain discussion moves as fallacious, and also offers a new argument for the principle of charity the model uses (the “maximal” strategies).

Frank Zenker (University of Lund, Lund)

Why study overlap between “is” and “ought” anyways?

Recently, empirically investigating the Pragma-dialectical discussion rules has resulted in claiming their partial conventional validity. This occurred under the principled qualification that no degree of correspondence between normative rule-content and experimentally elicited ordinary arguer response can verify or falsify said content. The invoked principle was that of avoiding a naturalistic fallacy. Vis à vis this concession, I seek to clarify their status as pragmatically justified rules and try to make more precise how measuring (degrees of) conventional validity can be of heuristic value for future theoretical development. With respect to obeying the standard report-format, it is pointed out that summarizing data via mean and standard deviation runs the risk of hiding differences which are potentially useful when seeking to replicate these findings.

Gergana Zlatkova (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano)

Reported argumentation in financial news articles: problems of reconstruction

The paper investigates the possibility of reconstructing economic-financial newspaper articles as a critical discussion. Several pragmatic features of financial news pose a challenge to argumentative reconstruction. Firstly, it is difficult to identify the authors of these texts with the protagonist since both the predictive standpoints and the arguments supporting them are rarely explicitly endorsed by the journalist and tend to be attributed to other subjects. In fact, diluting the argumentative responsibility, the journalists present their discourse as informative rather than persuasive. Secondly, the arguments supporting the predictions are succinctly evoked rather than expounded and very often include pointers to “black boxes”. However, the analysis of a corpus of economic-financial newspapers article shows that there are indicators which provide a sufficient basis to ascertain to what extent the journalist assumes the role of a protagonist, and that in many cases the argumentative reconstruction of the article is fully justified.

Janja Žmavc (The Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana)

The ethos of classical rhetoric: from epieikeia to auctoritas

A detailed research of classical rhetoric can offer a useful starting point to refine our perception and application of its concepts to the contemporary models of rhetorical and argumentative analysis. One of the most interesting classical concepts appears to be rhetorical ethos, a strategy of favorable character presentation. Ancient rhetorical ethos reveals a multifaceted nature that originates in the role of the speaker in Greek and Roman society. Based on this hypothesis, we shall present examples of ancient conceptions of character presentation and propose two main interpretative directions that, only when joined together, fully constitute a complex concept of classical rhetorical ethos. Considering some contemporary notions of ethos identified within modern rhetorical and argumentative theoretical models, we shall demonstrate how such elaborated understanding of “classical” ethos can contribute to modern rhetorical or/and argumentative analysis.