Argumentation and Language — Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations

Steve OSWALD is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His research scopes over the fields of linguistics, pragmatics, argumentation theory and cognitive science, and his main area of investigation covers the interface between language and cognition in discourse. He has extensively worked on verbal deception and the rhetorical effectiveness of (fallacious) argumentation, integrating both phenomena in a cognitive pragmatic theory of verbal communication and complementing this theoretical import with empirical studies of media and political discourse. From a methodological perspective, his work has explored how a cognitive pragmatic model can be a powerful tool in the analysis of discourse, notably in what regards argument reconstruction. His latest research project is devoted to a theoretical and empirical exploration of the argumentative features of conspiracy theories and tries to interface extant research in cognitive and social psychology with more traditional philosophical approaches to conspiracy theories through an account of their typical argumentative profiling. He has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics with Didier Maillat (Elsevier, 2013), a collective volume with Thierry Herman, Rhetoric & Cognition (Peter Lang, 2014), contributed many chapters in edited books and also published his research in a number of other international outlets (Pragmatics & Cognition, Argumentation, International Review of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies among others). Thierry HERMAN is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Univeristies of Neuchâtel and Lausanne. He is also docente in the Institute for Argumentation and Language Studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano). His research is focused on rhetoric and persuasion, considered from a linguistic and pragmatic frame. He has worked on political, journalistic and academic discourses, showing how the rhetorical frame (that is to say a social, discursive and cognitive frame) is useful to pinpoint persuasive strategies and fallacious arguments. He has also a deep interest in the link between argumentation theory and linguistics and many of his talks or publications are about structures of argumentation, argumentation from authority, explanation and argumentation, Toulmin's layout of arguments. He has co-edited a collective volume with Steve Oswald, Rhetoric & Cognition (Peter Lang, 2014) and contributed many chapters in edited books. He has mainly published in French outlets (Argumentation et Analyse de discours, Semen, Communication et Langage, among others) and will be publishing an online book of tools for rhetorical analysis of texts during 2016-2017. He has co-founded a research group gathering scholars interested by argumentation in Switzerland (CoRReA) with Jérôme Jacquin, Steve Oswald and Raphaël Micheli. Jérôme JACQUIN is a Lecturer in the Departments of French Linguistics and Language & Information Sciences at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is also a Research Associate in the "Language in the Workplace" project at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he has been invited as Visiting Scholar and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation [P2LAP1_155110]. His research draws on insights and methods from Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Conversation Analysis to investigate

Chapter 1 Introduction; Steve Oswald, Thierry Herman and Jérôme Jacquin.- Part I Linguistic Resources of Argumentation.- Chapter 2 A Linguistic Revision of Toulmin's Layout of Arguments; Thierry Herman.- Chapter 3 Style and Grammar in Political Discourse: Complementation and its Argumentative-Rhetorical Potential;  Maarten van Leeuwen.- Chapter 4 Evidential and Argumentative Functions of Dynamic Appearance Verbs in Italian: The Example of Rivelare and Emergere; Johanna Miecznikowski.- Chapter 5 Tracing the Roots of Defeasible Reasoning through Argumentative Indicators: A Study of the Italian Verb Sembra in Opinion Articles; Elena Musi.- Chapter 6 What is the Contribution of Connectives to Discourse Meaning? The With or Without Issue (WWI); Jacques Moeschler.- Part II Argumentative Processes: Cognition and Discourse.- Chapter 7 Argumentation as a Bridge between Metaphor and Reasoning; Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola and Maria Grazia Rossi.- Chapter 8 The Straw Man Fallacy as a Prestige-Gaining Device; Louis de Saussure.- Chapter 9 Types of Dialogue and Pragmatic Ambiguity; Fabrizio Macagno and Sarah Bigi.- Chapter 10 Practical Argumentation in the Making: Discursive Construction of Reasons for Action;  Marcin Lewinski.- Chapter 11 Exercising Accountability in European Parliamentary Debates on Statements: An Argumentative Perspective; Dima Mohammed.- Chapter 12 Collaborative Decision-Making in Argumentative Group Discussions among Primary School Children; Vera Mundwiler and Judith Kreuz.