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Argumentation, metadiscourse and social cognition: organizing knowledge in political communicationUNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER, USA, susanam{at}colorado.edu The present article attempts to contribute to a multidisciplinary approach to communication phenomena that emphasizes the interplay among cognition, discourse and society. I propose an examination of the role that these three elements play in argumentation and meta-discourse as a useful starting point for understanding, first, how arguments are formed and second, the role that meta-discursive devices play in this process. In the first two sections I conduct a brief review of literature on the concepts of argumentation and meta-discourse to show how a socio-cognitive approach can enlighten our understanding of both. This model is then applied in the analysis section to look at a plenary session at the European Parliament. I conduct a socio-cognitive discourse analysis, based on which I identify different relevant paths followed by speakers when constructing arguments: (re)framings, (re)definitions, quotations and references to previous events. The findings demonstrate how the different levels of meta-discourse — intra-textual, inter-textual and contextual — are equally relevant for argumentative communication. Through meta-discourse, speakers invoke knowledge about both the ongoing interaction and other past or future communicative events. These other discourses, however, are not only constituted by the actual words uttered, but they encompass the context and situation models (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983) that allow participants to make sense of them.
Key Words: argumentation • discourse analysis • European Parliament • meta-discourse • political communication • social cognition
Discourse & Society, Vol. 20, No. 6,
727-746 (2009) |
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