Sara Greco

Discourse permeates human life, manifesting itself in all kinds of speech acts, from conversations to clinical dialogues between a patient and practitioner. While discourse has been studied within specific disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, over the last few decades an autonomous approach, known as Discourse Analysis, has emerged to develop its own theoretical and research agendas aimed at penetrating the nature and role of discourse in human life. This collection of case studies in discourse aims to examine these agendas in specific situations, and thus to contribute to the growing significance of this exciting field of inquiry. It thus presents a composite picture of what discourse analysis is and what it allows us to do in the area of speech analysis. The chapters deal with the kinds of discourses that characterize medical communication, media and public discourse, conflict resolution and reconciliation, juridical communication, gastronomical language, text messaging, education, and others. Written by active researchers in the fields of discourse analysis proper and its correlative field of argumentation theory, both the expert and the neophyte will be able to glean from the various chapters how this new discipline is evolving and what it can achieve in shedding light on the complexities of human interaction.



Table of Contents



Preface



Marcel Danesi

Discourse, Dialogue, and Conversation: A Schematic Overview



Eddo Rigotti and Rudi Palmieri

Solomon’s Wise Judgment: A Case Study of Argumentation in Context



Elizabeth Bolton

The Nature of the Personal Response to Literature: A Side-by-Side Comparison of Undergraduate Students’ Written Responses to Traditional Literature and Short Realistic Fiction



Frank Nuessel

Clinical Discourse Analysis and Alzheimer's Disease: Overview and Recommendations



Mariana Bockarova

Understanding Work Group Stress in the Workplace: A Discourse Analytic Approach



Emma Cooper

Designing an Interview Protocol Focusing on Teachers’ Experiences Using Semiotic Theory in the Elementary Classroom: An Instrumental Case Study



Laura Di Chiaro

Discourse Analysis of a Sex Education Controversy: A Modern Perspective



Heba Elsherief

Can Safie Speak? On Reading the “Runaway Muslim Woman” Topos



Brigid Kelso

“I’ve Got Enough on My Plate. I Don't Need the Stress, Thanks:” Power Negotiation in a Faculty-Student Email Exchange



Ahmad Khanlari

The Discourse of “Love” in Persian and English Literature: A Comparison of Hafez’s Lyrics and Shakespeare’s Sonnets



Susan Zahradnik

Txtese: Gr8 or not 2 Gr8? Up 2 U 2 Decide



Nakia Lee-Foon

It’s Not What You Say But How You Say It, It’s Not What You Say But What You Don’t: Exploring Parent-Youth Sexual Health Discourse



Nicole Najda

Aphasic to Aphasic Interaction



Maria Xenitidou and Ifigeneia Kokkali

The Regularities of Migration? Thematic and Discursive Interplay in the Talk of Greeks and Albanians in Greece



Nanon H. M. Labrie

Patients’ Arguments for Adherence: A Thematic Discourse Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Responses



Johanna Miecznikowski

“An Experience That Apparently Differs a Lot from Mine”. Evidentials in Discourse: The Case of Gastronomic Discussions



Steve Oswald and Thierry Herman

Argumentation, Conspiracy and the Moon: A Rhetorical-Pragmatic Analysis



Kyoko Murakami

Discursively Managing Sensitivity: A Case of Anglo-Japanese Reconciliation over the Second World War



Sara Greco

Framing and Reframing in Dispute Mediation: An Argumentative Perspective



Stacy Costa

The Discourse of Gamification of the Curriculum in the 21st Century and Its Relation to Assessment and Student Outcomes



Sara Cigada

Analyzing Emotions in French Discourse: (Manipulative?) Shortcuts



Sara Rubinelli and Julia Amann

Critical Health Literacy through the Lens of Argumentation Theory

“Sara Greco-Morasso is a prominent member of a group of young scholars that are spearheading research into the role of argumentation in a variety of concrete social, cultural and professional contexts and practices. Her book on the role of argumentation in mediation shines for theoretical finesse and for attention to detail in examining real practices and authentic conversational data. The palette of theoretical and methodological tools put to good use in the book is impressive, and most notably includes the use of lexical semantics in the clarification of key domain terms (like conflict) and the application of loci (topics) to the analysis of the inferential configurations of the arguments used by mediators.
With this sensitive and well informed book, argumentation quietly reclaims a domain that is naturally its own: the use of reason in dialogue to restore jeopardized relationships.”
Andrea Rocci, Università Della Svizzera Italiana (USI)


“A specific strength of this brilliant work is the very refined analysis of conflicts in their argumentative but also human, emotional as well as cognitive dimensions. In the actual practice of conflict resolution, these elements mutually scaffold each other for better or for worse. The reader will find a very detailed account of how the process of argumentation is co-constructed in the context of dispute mediation. In other words, this book re-reads the tenets of conflict resolution from a communicative viewpoint, showing how the fundamental principles of mediation are realized by means of the mediator’s contribution to the parties’ argumentative discussion. The consideration of the disputants' interests (guaranteed by the mediator) builds the necessary trust for them to shift from conflict to cooperation and opens the way to enter into a sound argumentative process. The mediator's argumentative awareness is a key-element in this respect: it enhances the possibility to reframe the problem and helps the parties build a creative solution to their problem. This very well informed book will fascinate all those who are interested in understanding argumentation and conflict mediation in context.”
Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, University of Neuchâtel

The escalation of disagreement into overt conflict in social interaction can be avoided, if disagreement is managed through argumentative dialogue. This paper explores the characteristics of argumentative dialogue and presents the role of third parties who design spaces for others' dialogue. After discussing the prototypical example of dispute mediators, this contribution considers other informal third parties who have a similar role. This opens up a new perspective on informal third parties who work as designers of dialogue and build spaces to manage disagreement in social interaction.

The European Union is making increased efforts to find simpler and more effective ways to function adequately in the eyes of its citizens by using ‘soft law’ instruments such as recommendations. Although they have no legally binding force, recommendations have practical and legal effects occurring partly due to their normative content in which a course of action is prescribed and further supported by arguments intended to persuade the addressees of a political position. Although recommendations function as persuasive instruments due to their argumentation, the characteristics of argumentation and how it is employed to convince the addressee to comply with certain measures have not been investigated at all. The main goal of the paper is to explain how arguments are used by the European Commission when recommending Member States to follow a new course of action. First, we will unravel the justificatory reasons employed by the Commission in order to make Member States comply with new measures and we will show how these reasons are combined into an argumentative pattern (van Eemeren in Argumentation 30(1): 1–23, 2016; J Argum Context 6(1): 3–26, 2017). This pattern basically prescribes a course of action to Member States, which is further supported by arguments in which the necessity and advantages of following the proposed course of action are justified. Second, we will explain how and why the way in which the arguments are combined in this complex pattern could be potentially persuasive for the Member States despite the legally non-binding character of recommendations. We will show that the European Commission tries to persuade the Member States to take new measures by evading the burden of proof imposed by the legislative framework. At a more specific level of analysis, we will delve into the implicit premises in the argumentation, which enable us to identify cases of evasion of the burden of proof due to the Commission’s use of implicit starting points which might not be accepted by the Member States.

The starting point of this paper is the acknowledgement that individual reasoning, understood as inner dialogue, and social argumentation, albeit they are two different phenomena, share some similarities. On this basis, this paper sets out to apply instruments from argumentation theory (in particular, in a pragma-dialectical perspective) to inner dialogue in order to better explain it. Within this framework, some limitations to the study of inner dialogue are also discussed; and methodological suggestions are provided in order to grasp what could be considered data on “inner dialogue” starting from social research interviews. The ultimate aim is to go beyond a mere recognition of a similarity between inner dialogue and argumentation and start analysing inner dialogue empirically using tools from argumentation theory. The findings show that the analytic overview help shed light on how inner dialogue within processes of individual decision-making develops and what it means to have an internal difference of opinion, in which one and the same person adopts opposing standpoints and argues for them. On the opposite, it is shown that the notion of strategic manoeuvring per se cannot be applied to inner dialogue.

By focusing on a case study of institutional argumentation in the sector of data protection and transparency, this paper offers a view on the role of institutional argumentative discourse aimed at conflict prevention in public organizations. In particular, the context we are analyzing is that of a Swiss institutional role named Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC). Among other tasks, the person who serves as a FDPIC has the right to monitor data protection in the whole territory of the Swiss Confederation, with the possibility of issuing recommendations to subjects who are found in violation of the law on this matter. The FDPIC's role appears similar to that of ombudsmen; his or her recommendations are not binding for the parties, but they represent powerful argument-based warnings that serve the function of preventing escalation to a court proceeding. The specific nature of this type of recommendation is explored in this paper both at the level of a semantic-pragmatic analysis of the speech act " to recommend " , and at the level of argumentation. Integrating an argumentative level is necessary to fully explain the intended effect of this specific type of speech act of recommendation in this context. Argumentation is also advanced by the FDPIC to support his decision: by devising a comprehensive, convincing and well-structured argumentative discourse, the FDPIC pursues the ultimate pragmatic goal of preventing the emergence of conflicts between citizens and legal authorities.

This paper sets out to analyse cultural semiotics of migrants' food and culinary practices. Moving from the perspective of the Tartu school of semiotics, which views culture both as a grammar (a set of codes) and as a set of texts, food can be characterized as a specific cultural element where grammar and text (code and experience) are woven together. International migrants live one or more ruptures and changes in their status quo due to their adaptation to the receiving country, which puts their cultural habits into questions. In this framework, even " normal " and well-established culinary practices might need to change. In this relation, I claim that it is on the basis of migrants' new experience abroad that it is possible to change culinary grammars. In order to move beyond a descriptive account of change, and understand the reasons why migrants construct a new semiotics of food, this paper also integrates elements from argumentation theory in order to analyse the reasons given by migrants to explain the changes they are making. The analysis proposed here is based on a corpus of interviews to migrating mothers of different origins, all living in the greater London area.

Moving from the findings of the “Migrants in transition” project (https://sites.google.com/site/migrantsandmothers), which set out to study migrant mothers’ inner dialogue and its argumentative structure, this paper considers the dialogical relations between object of study and research method. In other words, it explores dialogicality connecting inner dialogue and the social experience of the research interview. The project was based on 29 in-depth interview to mothers during their transition process following one or more ruptures at least partly linked to their experience of international migration (Kadianaki, 2010; Zittoun, 2006). At the time of the interviews (2010-2012), all participants were living in the greater London area with at least one child. Variance was granted in terms of linguistic, ethnic and cultural origin, number of children, work-family balance, migration strategy and family status. When analysing migrant mothers’ narratives of their inner dialogue, a striking ...

In the literature on dialogism, a need has emerged for analytical tools enabling researchers to retrace dialogism in human interaction. These instruments necessarily encompass some kind of approach to text analysis, as the data that researchers are confronted with when studying interaction are either transcriptions of oral interactions or written texts. This paper proposes to integrate a tool from argumentation theory (the Argumentum Model of Topics) in order to contribute to the analysis of addressivity in the context of a dialogical analysis. The specific context taken into account is that of research interviews to migrant women with children. The claim is that the Argumentum Model of Topics allows reconstructing implicit premises which are taken for granted during the interaction. Understanding implicit premises means eliciting multiple levels of addressivity that can be present in one and the same discourse. It emerges that, very often, the interviewer is addressed both as a researcher and as a mother sharing some common trait (e.g. raising children in the UK) with the participants.

This paper considers the complex relation between migrants’ interest in their host country and their consequent civic or social engagement in the framework of processes of transition following the rupture of international migration (cf. Zittoun 2006). In phases of transition, migrants live processes of identity definition, sense-making of the situation and learning new knowledge and social, cognitive and practical skills. I argue that learning may be considered a precondition for a migrant’s interest and engagement with the host country culture and institutions. In this connection, I use Eade’s (2007) notion of migration strategy to describe migrant profiles based on learning. My case is supported by a qualitative analysis of two paradigmatic case studies.

This article is set within the general frame of the discussion on the reconstruction of implicit premises in argumentation. On the backdrop of the theoretical framework provided by the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT), we set out to propose a hypothesis on how the endoxa of a given argument scheme are derived from certain cognitive frames activated by the use of linguistic units, which we call keywords. Implicit premises in argumentation are described according to the distinction between procedural and material starting points: the former refer to the inferential component of the argument scheme; the latter, to the premises of a contextual nature, which allow the argument scheme to become relevant for the interlocutors in a specific dialogical context. Our proposal is focused on the reconstruction of the endoxical part of the material starting points. The proposed hypothesis on the linguistic activation of endoxa is illustrated through the analysis of a case of political debate. The theoretical hypothesis proposed in the article, set at the crossroads between the study of argumentation theory and linguistic semantics, is a first step towards the understanding of the connection between the linguistic and the inferential level in the structure of argument schemes.


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By presenting a case study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this article introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, that is, the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of news reporting to propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I investigate in detail a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices (the lexical choices that build up the frame) and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises (endoxa) which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment on the news.

This paper is a review of Marcelo Dascal’s book Interpretation and
Understanding (2003), which collects a series of papers published by Dascal on
various topics related to the pragmatics of communication and, in particular, to
the hearer’s task of grasping meaning. The present work aims at discussing some
relevant issues which emerge in the volume, such as the concept of communicative
action (with the related notions of commitment and involvement), and a
deepening of the different possible types of individual and collective actions.
Moreover, a typology of difficult cases of communication is presented, ranging
from simple indirect communication, to misunderstandings, conflicts and controversies;
in these cases, a particular effort in understanding is required.

This paper, expounding one of the focal issues of my dissertation1, concerns some
communicative dynamics that are bound to discourse and dialogue common ground, i.e.
to the set of common knowledge, beliefs and values shared by the interlocutors as
individuals and members of a certain community and building an important component
of community’s identity. The common ground evolves and increases in communicative
interaction in two distinct ways: through all the factual material explicitly manifested in
communication, and through accommodation, i.e. through an adjustment of the common
ground imposed by the presuppositions of what has been said. From the theoretical
point of view, this paper deals with the problem of presupposition and with the
functioning of this dimension in verbal communication. From the empirical point of
view, the main concern is the risk of manipulation implied by various practices of
accommodation.

Abstract The development of argumentation theories in the contemporary epistemological space is shortly outlined and the pragma-dialectical approach is, in particular, considered for its focus on the theoretical kernel of the discipline and for systematically eliciting, from this, the ...

Van EemerenÕs and HoutlosserÕs paper is inspired by an articulated research programme on strategic manoeuvring, supported by the Dutch National Science Foundation, in which the Amsterdam school of argu-mentation is currently involved. The notion of strategic ...

This paper focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments, generally referred to as argument scheme. After outlining our approach, denominated Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, see Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2006, 2009; Rigotti 2006, 2008, 2009), we compare it to other modern and contemporary approaches, to eventually illustrate some advantages offered by it. In spite of the evident connection with

Abstract How can argumentation skills be improved by engaging students in argu-mentative practices where they are helped to assume a healthy critical attitude, and provide reasons for their positions? What are the synergies of learning to argue and arguing to learn (see ...

Basing on the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) within the general framework of a pragma-dialectical viewpoint on argumentation, this paper analyses the role of argumentation from analogy in international migrants’ decision-making processes on the basis of a corpus of interviews to migrant mothers resident in the greater London area. Reasoning from analogy allows evaluating pragmatic decisions – such as leaving one’s home country, staying over in a foreign country, etc. –in terms of feasibility and reasonableness.