Ruth Amossy

This paper shows the contemporary relevance of rhetoric’s insights by showing how today’s disciplines deal with one of its key notions: ethos. It enumerates some of the labels under which it is studied in various disciplines: presentation of self, impression management, image repair, branding, etc. The main part of the essay, however, is devoted to the re-appropriation of ethos by Discourse Analysis (DA), Argumentation in Discourse (a branch of rhetorical argumentation), and, more broadly, by disciplines focusing on discourse and communication. It draws heavily, but not exclusively, on the Francophone trends that devoted a considerable amount of work to ethos both on the theoretical level and in studies of concrete corpora from the domains of politics, the media, sciences, literature, and more. While examining how rhetoric infuses contemporary theories, it highlights the development and enrichment of the rhetorical notion of ethos in frameworks that shed new light on it, contribute tools for in-depth analysis, and redefine its social and political stakes.

This paper aims at showing how the New Rhetoric’s insights allow for an integration of argumentation studies in linguistic investigation, and more specifically in discourse analysis. Claiming that argumentativity is a constitutive feature of discourse, it endeavors to explore logos as both reason and language by analyzing patterns of reasoning in their discursive actualization. In this approach, the attempt at influencing the audience’s representations is analyzed in the complexity of a discourse explored in its formal and socio-institutional dimensions.

Rather than the art of putting forward logically valid arguments leading to Truth, argumentation is here viewed as the use of verbal means ensuring an agreement on what can be considered reasonable by a given group, on a more or less controversial matter. What is acceptable and plausible is always coconstructed by subjects engaging in verbal interaction. It is the dynamism of this exchange, realized not only in natural language, but also in a specific cultural framework, that has to be accounted for. From this perspective, it is not enough to reconstruct patterns of reasoning. As logos is by definition both Reason and Language, abstract schemata have to be examined in their verbal realization in a given situation of discourse. Such an approach to arguments allows for a “thick” description taking into account their discursive and communicational aspects, as well as argumentation’s constitutive dialogism and its inscription in a set of common representations, opinions and beliefs (a doxa). This approach, exemplified by the analysis of a short text on stock options borrowed from the French newspaper Libération, is an attempt at establishing a dialogue between disciplines like argumentation theories, rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis.