Pragmatics And Rhetoric

Pragmatics and Rhetoric for Discourse Analysis: Some conceptual remarks
Jesus M. Larrazabal and Kepa Korta*
{ylplaanj, kkorta}@sc.ehu.es
Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI)
The University of the Basque Country
Avda. Jose Elosegi 275
20015 Donostia – San Sebastián
Spain

Longas são as estradas da
Galileia e curta a piedade dos homens. (Eça de Queiróz, O suave milagre.) Abstract:
This paper focuses on discourse analysis, particularly persuasive discourse, using pragmatics and rhetoric in a new combined way, called by us Pragma-Rhetoric. It can be said that this is a cognitive approach to both pragmatics and rhetoric. Pragmatics is essentially Gricean, Rhetoric comes from a new reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, extending his notion of discourse to meso- and micro-discourses. Two kinds of intentions have to be considered: first, communicative intention, and, then, persuasive intention. The fulfilment of those intentions is achieved by a successful persuasivecommunicative action. The psychological, philosophical and logical aspects derived from the pragma-rhetorical perspective are crucial in view of its applications in several practical domains.
Keywords: Discourse, pragmatics, rhetoric, communication, intention, persuasion.
0. Introduction
Let us begin this paper with our recognition to a philosopher of action, language and communication, Marcelo Dascal, a Leibnizian particularly interested in semantics and pragmatics, who has contributed so much to the development of philosophy in the last
30 years. The aim of this paper is to propose a pragmatic and rhetorical view in discourse analysis, combining both disciplines in order to explain the intentional
*

This work has been partially supported by a research project of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (PB98-0250) and another one of the University of the
Basque Country (UE01/A10).
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phenomena that occur in most communicative uses of language, namely, the communicative intention

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