Jérôme Jacquin

In Swiss semi-direct democracy, citizens are often summoned to the polls. To vote reasonably, they need to be properly informed. The media therefore have the responsibility to provide them with arguments for and against each issue of voting. Here, we focus on argumentation in a television ‘civic debate’ about abolishing compulsory military service. To provide a unified and integrated overview of the debate dynamics, we combine the Dialogical Model of Argumentation and the Argumentum Model of Topics, which share a similar emphasis on the discursive dimension of argumentation. This analysis underlines the importance of linguistic and communicative resources and procedures, without neglecting the macro socio-political environment of the debate.

The ‘Spheres of Contextualization’. Methodological Study on Text-to- Text(s) Contextualization in Corpus Constitution.This paper discusses the notion of contextualization from the perspective of textual discourse analysis (analyse textuelle des discours). Contextualization is here defined as a process through which the researcher attempts to establish that it is relevant to relate a text with another text (or with several other texts) and to gather these texts into a corpus. We suggest that it is useful to identify three criteria (genre, author and topic) which allow passage from text to text(s) and which outline what we propose to call spheres of contextualization. Eventually, we suggest a hierarchisation of the three spheres and we discuss the relationships between them.

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus.

This collective volume is devoted to the exploration of the intricate relationships between argumentative practices and the linguistic, discursive and cognitive underpinnings of their verbal realisation. The volume gathers a selection of 11 contributions that were presented during the inaugural edition of the Argumentation and Language conference series (ARGAGE), which took place at the University of Lausanne in September 2015. The thematic unity of this volume therefore stems from a common commitment, from all contributors, to the adoption of a linguistically-informed perspective applied to the study of argumentative practices.