Pragmatics for argumentation

Abstract

The relationship between argumentation and language has recently attracted a great deal of attention through various publications in the field of argumentation studies (see e.g., Boogaart et al., 2021; Hinton, 2021; Oswald et al., 2018; Oswald et al., 2020). In this paper I propose a historical overview of this relationship by narrowing the scope of my inquiry onto the various ways in which argumentation studies, over the last 50 years, have drawn on research in the field of linguistic pragmatics, which I will limit here to its speech act-theoretic and inferential traditions, respectively based on the seminal groundwork of Austin and Grice (Austin, 1962; Grice, 1989). I first discuss various points of contact between the two disciplines, as they have been put forth by researchers in argumentation over time. I then articulate this overview around three types of contributions pragmatics has been able to offer argumentation scholarship: descriptive, normative and explanatory contributions. These correspond to the main research questions investigated within argumentation theory. The paper thus examines current work at the interface of argumentation and pragmatics that illustrates how argumentative research that seeks to answer these three research questions has been pragmatically infused over the last 50 years. I conclude with some thoughts on promising directions of research which demonstrate that the research potential of this interface is far from being exhausted.

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