• Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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The Pragmatics of Cogent Argumentation in British and American Political Debates

Since the time of Aristotle, various approaches have been offered to tackle what makes language stronger. Some approaches have focused on rhetoric, while others have given attention to logic. Still others have concentrated on dialectics. This book takes into account a full-fledged comprehensive model of analysis that brings these three perspectives together. Throughout, it investigates the presence of pragmatic criteria and the utilization of pragmatic strategies that make language stronger in the context of argumentation. Cogent argumentation is a pragmatic communicative interactional process that goes through stages, and is regarded as a communicative exchange of arguments. The cogency of these arguments is attained according to the availability of pragmatic criteria and the utilization of pragmatic strategies, and determined throughout the whole process of argumentation.

The book will be of interest to anyone interested in the fields of pragmatics, communication, and politics, and will widen their understanding of the pragmatic structure and criteria which constitute cogent argumentation.


Waleed Ridha Hammoodi Al-Juwaid holds a BA and MA in English Language and Linguistics/Pragmatics from the College of Education in the Department of English of the University of Babylon, Iraq. He also received a PhD from the same institution in 2018, and currently works as an English teacher in a preparatory school in Hillah, Iraq. He is interested in English language and linguistics, pragmatics, Phonetics, stylistics, rhetoric, and contrastive studies, among other disciplines. He is a member of the Association of Translators in Baghdad, Iraq, and has authored and co-authored four books, one of which is A Pragmatic Study of Strategic Manoeuvring in Political Interviews.

"His definition of cogent argumentation incorporates most (if not all) previous scholar’s work on the subject and then amalgamates them into a comprehensive matrix of his own design, the likes of which has never been seen. He is well published within the specific linguistic field of rhetoric and argumentation. He is affiliated with the Ministry of Education, the General Directorate of Education in Babylon, Iraq. His methodology is inexhaustibly thorough... Despite the book’s complexity, it is very well organized. The many tables and figures elucidate and clarify meaning. The evidence is indeed detailed and compelling enough to make me want to see his eclectic model of analysis employed in other contexts."

Dr Jessica Ashe

"The [book] is a breakthrough in understanding the pragmatics of political debate. Being introductory in the field, [it] is highly recommended for those interested in the language of politicians especially in the Anglo-American sphere."

Mohammed Nasser Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics, Wasit University, Iraq

“[This book] introduces a model of argumentation with some interesting innovative features and illustrates them with some timely applications to political debates. […] The early chapters investigate an impressive range of relevant literature on the way to setting out the details of a final model of cogent argumentation, including the work of some of the principal authors associated with such theories as pragma-dialectics, informal logic and speech act theory (among others). In each case, the appreciations are succinct and accurate. […] Most interesting in all this is the way the model accommodates but then furthers the pragma-dialectical model (in both its standard and later forms). This is an innovative aspect of the model of cogent argumentation that I think works well. The developed discussion (and application) of the pragma-logical and the pragma-rhetorical aspects stands out here. The pragma-logical is noteworthy because of the way it takes the importance of logical features much beyond what the pragma-dialecticians do and incorporates more recent appreciations of logic like that of Toulmin. This is important because of the way Toulmin himself broke with the logical tradition and insisted that the criteria for good arguments would vary across fields.”
Chris Tindale
Professor and Director, Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric, University of Windsor, Canada

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-5275-2957-6

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-2957-1

Release Date: 8th March 2019

Pages: 444

Price: £74.99

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