Agreement in Argumentation

This book focuses on the preliminary stages of the argumentative process, aiming to investigate how the activation of shared knowledge, values and beliefs lead to the creation of a common ground between speaker and audience, as a means of persuasion. In the first part of the book, the authors refer to Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric to unpack historical and theoretical perspectives, with a view to highlighting the essential elements of agreement beyond their different denominations and collocations into the different argumentative approaches. The second part of the book is devoted to the analysis of the actual uses of objects of agreement within the political domain, which have been chosen as an ideal interface for discursive and argumentative components. Different genres are represented within the British and American traditions, and the cases analyzed include a selection of speeches with a cultural salience within their respective political tradition, but with a resonance that extends beyond national boundaries. Having become part of a shared cultural heritage, such speeches have often become the source of inter-discursive and intertextual references, and have even contributed to the (re)shaping of contemporary systems of belief. This two-part analytic perspective applied to real cases of political discourse is a defining feature of this book, making it appealing to argumentation and discursive scholars, as well as experts on communication.