Inés Olza, Óscar Loureda & Manuel Casado-Velarde (eds.), Language Use in Public Sphere, Berna, Peter Lang, pp. 201-224, 2014
The Theory of Argumentation Within Language (TAL) is a semantic theory that was initiated during ... more The Theory of Argumentation Within Language (TAL) is a semantic theory that was initiated during the mid-1970s by Oswald Ducrot, Jean-Claude Anscombre, and their followers-for the most part Romance Language scholars. Among other topics, this theory considers how the meaning of words conditions the dynamics of discourse, and, as will be shown in this article using linguistic criteria, also enables the demonstration of how some connotations of a text are produced. To achieve this, the TAL has developed easily comprehensible theoretical devices-such as that of argumentative orientation-and equally simple proofs-the use of but, for example-that demonstrate the importance of lexical selection in communication. They show, in other words, how a single fact can be understood in different ways according to the linguistic formulation chosen to communicate it. This article will provide numerous examples of this explicative ability of the TAL and will conclude with persuasive linguistic arguments that support certain proposals made by the defenders of "person first" language-often orthophemisms-as compared to the dysphemisms they are meant to replace.
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Papers by Jean Yates