A Pragmatic Analysis of Deliberation in Legal Setting

Abstract

Deliberation is an increasingly used concept in Argumentation Theory and Linguistic Analysis. But only recently research combined empirical and conceptual tool-boxes from these disciplines for the study of deliberative discourse. The aim of this article is to present a discursive analysis of deliberation as a genre using the relational pragmatic analysis of texts. In particular, we want to see whether different features of deliberation genre map onto relational pragmatic dimension of texts. To do so, authors analyze, in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the relational discourse structure of legal speeches of argumentative micro-texts written by citizens participating in a series of deliberative mini-publics. Results suggest that genre affects the relational to pragmatic analysis of texts and that we could analyze this effect in RST. Finally, we present, to our knowledge, the first annotated corpus-based genre analysis of the relational pragmatic dimension of argumentative micro texts.