This article offers a philosophical reinterpretation of the classical rhetorical principle of decorum in the context of contemporary public communication. It examines how linguistic forms traditionally regarded as inappropriate, particularly taboo language, may participate in the construction of rhetorical credibility. Although taboo language has been studied extensively from linguistic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and psychological perspectives, its relationship to rhetorical ethos, political proximity, and the strategic negotiation of communicative norms merits further consideration within argumentation theory. The article proposes a distinction between authority-based and similarity-based ethos as two analytical modes of credibility construction that may coexist within the same rhetorical performance. Drawing on relational accounts of ethos, Burke’s concept of identification, and the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic maneuvering, it argues that taboo language may, in particular contexts, function as a resource for reducing perceived distance between a speaker and an audience. This possibility does not imply that such language is inherently persuasive or that its use necessarily enhances credibility. Its rhetorical significance depends on contextual interpretation, audience expectations, and the communicative function it performs. Three examples from contemporary public discourse serve as heuristic illustrations of possible mechanisms of identification rather than as empirical evidence of audience reception or persuasive effects. The article thus develops an account of decorum as context-sensitive rhetorical appropriateness while acknowledging the limitations of the proposed conceptual model.
This study surveys orientations toward interpersonal arguing in Poland, using subsamples of younger (mean age = 21.4 years, n = 208) and older (mean age = 70 years, n = 170) respondents. The primary aim of the study was to compare the two subsamples, and a substantial number of age effects were found. Previous work in other nations indicates generally that as people grow older, they become less eager to argue. However, some results suggest that when older people do argue, they may be rather forceful, especially when the argument seems to have relevance to the older arguer’s status. We found that older Poles were more careful, more peaceful and less worried in interpersonal arguing when compared to younger ones. Older adults showed less interest in arguing for the specific sorts of goals we measured: to show dominance, to display one’s identity, to play, and to blurt out one’s thoughts. Younger Poles showed more emotional activity during disagreements: they personalized conflicts to a greater degree, perceived themselves to be more persecuted by people who disagreed with them, and experienced more stress. We also found differences between men and women, and discovered that some of these were moderated by age. Power distance was influential in both subsamples, but had stronger effects for the older group. Discussion focuses on finding patterns to the age differences, comparing them to earlier work, and integrating them with socio-emotional selectivity theory.
Family mediation discourse integrates cultural norms, communicative strategies and dispute settlement reasoning. Drawing on corpus data from a mainstream Chinese televised mediation program, this paper applies a pragma-dialectical framework rooted in China’s traditional framework of qing-li-fa (affection–reason–law). Centered on the cultural maxim “a harmonious family flourishes” (jiā hé wàn shì xīng), the analysis examines Chinese mediators’ culturally situated strategic maneuvering. The paper first identifies diverse argumentative appeal types adopted by mediation participants to advance qing, li and fa claims and compares their distributional patterns. Statistical findings reveal disputants rely heavily on pathos-based qing appeals and logos-based li appeals, while ethos-based fa appeals remain marginal. Second, the paper categorises forms of argumentative disagreements in family mediation and analyses how kinship relations and harmony norms shape the interactive development of these divergences. Third, it investigates how mediators conduct harmony-oriented strategic maneuvering across the three pragma-dialectical dimensions (topical potential, audience demand, presentational devices) to reconcile participants’ culturally grounded claims while balancing rhetorical effectiveness and dialectical reasonableness. This study enriches cross-cultural pragma-dialectical research on institutional mediation by unpacking culture-specific normative constraints on strategic maneuvering, providing comparative empirical reference for global analyses of familial argumentation.
Argument reconstruction is typically treated as a technical procedure aimed at identifying underlying argumentative content. In this article, however, we show that reconstruction actively shapes how the speaker is represented in annotated data and thereby affects how argumentative action is modelled. Our analysis is based on an experimental manual annotation of a purpose-built dataset, combined with a critical review of dominant reconstruction practices employed in existing Argument Mining resources, in particular within the framework of Inference Anchoring Theory. We identify recurrent reconstruction operations and analyse their consequences for the representation of argumentation, especially with regard to the visibility of the speaker as an agent of argumentative action. Our analysis of annotation practices further reveals systematic interpretative patterns in which argumentative meaning is extracted from forms that are ostensibly non-argumentative, such as autobiographical narratives. We show that reconstruction often involves a pragmatic transformation of an utterance’s function rather than merely the completion of locutionary content.
This paper proposes an extension of Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) that incorporates speaker-centered pragmatic phenomena: arguer identity, phatic speech acts, and emotive speech acts into the analysis of natural-language argumentation. While recent work has shown how ethos can be operationalized within IAT, the theory has not yet accounted for how pathos and phatic functions shape the dialogical conditions under which argumentative acts become felicitous. We argue that the felicity of phatic-maintaining, emotion-appealing, and emotion-expressing acts depends on the speaker’s perceived authorization, and that this authorization is conditioned by the identity projected through personality-based dispositions. We formalize these acts as additional illocutionary types within IAT and model how their acceptance or rejection influences the authorization of a subsequent act of arguing. A qualitative case study of the highest- and lowest-rated speakers in a competitive debate illustrates how differences in personality correspond to distinct patterns of phatic and emotive behavior, resulting in different evaluations of Perceived Argument Strength. The proposed extension provides a framework for analyzing how identity-sensitive authorization dynamics operate in dialogue and offers a foundation for future corpus-based and experimental research on the role of the arguer in argumentation.
