The Pragmatics of Cogent Argumentation in British and American Political Debates

"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."

“[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.”