ABSTRACT
The study of argumentation is fundamental in pragmatics since persuasion is present in different areas such as media, advertising, and political, legal, or conversational discourse.
The methodologies of analysis are also varied, including “new rhetoric”, critical discourse analysis,“argumentation in the language”, or the pragma-dialectics. This chapter reviews these methodological approaches, defines the key points of argumentative discourse, and proposes a multidimensional analysis that describes its discursive manifestation in relation to all the factors involved: the historical-socio-political context, the ideology, the communicative objective, and the discursive type. We focus on strategies such as intensification, attenuation, indirectness, subjectivity, polyphony, and self-image projection, and the expression mechanisms (argumentative devices); for example, discursive markers and scalarity, intonation, and non-verbal language, among others.
