ABSTRACT

This chapter begins with an overview of ancient and modern traditions of rhetoric and argumentation. These traditions can be useful for Critical Discourse Studies because they provide important research tools for the critical analysis of spoken or written texts. The chapter describes argument schemes, norms of rational argumentation, which can be used for the critical analysis of potentially fallacious arguments and the techniques of verbal presentation. Aristotle mainly focused on rhetoric as a theory of plausible argumentation. The most important contribution of later Greek and Roman rhetoric was not so much the development of fundamentally new theoretical insights, but the detailed elaboration of Aristotle's rhetorical concepts and the establishment of practical catalogues of arguments, styles and figures of speech. Modern theories of argumentation have taken up these concepts, and elaborated the existing typologies considerably as far as empirical documentation standards of explicitness and delimitation are concerned. Moreover, detailed norms of rational argumentation have been established, especially within van Eemeren/Grootendorst's Pragma-Dialectics.