This article describes interaction in a criminal (adult) court in which adolescents are punished. As a result of the particular set of courtroom dynamics and the youthfulness of the defendants in this court, two potentially conflicting ideas about punishment are expressed concurrently: (1) proportionality, and (2) reduced culpability among youth. I demonstrate how judges talk to adolescent defe...

This paper presents a discursive approach to the critical examination of information and describes its implementation options. The approach provides a set of concepts to ensure that examination dialogs on information objects take place in a systematic way. For this purpose, this paper takes a critical perspective on information, considers structural characteristics of examination dialog, and ar...

The article focuses on studying male and female speech behaviour in two national variants of English – British and American – and research in realizing the rich potential of meanings developing in modern English dialogue discourse. The analysis is not only based on functional and pragmatic approach to language study but also centers on modern trends in cognitive linguistics. The latest achievem...

It is well known that argumentation can usefully be analysed as a distinct, if complex, type of speech act. Speech acts that form a part of argumentative discourse, and in particular, of argumentative dialogue, can be seen as anchors for the establishment of inferences between propositions in the domain of discourse. Most often, the speech acts that directly give rise to inference are implicit,...

Current approaches to sentiment analysis assume that the sole discourse function of sentiment-bearing texts is expressivity. However, the persuasive discourse function also utilises expressive language. In this work, we present the results of training supervised classifiers on a new corpus of clinical texts that contain documents with an expressive discourse function, and we test the learned mo...

Following a mainstream British newspaper’s claim to have uncovered a new crime threat of ‘on-street grooming’, extensive and emotive debate continues around the so-called ‘Asian sex gang’ problem in the UK. This article examines the construction of a new racial crime threat, assessing the validity of its foundations and exploring its possible causes and consequences. Grooming is shown to be a d...

This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. Section 1 provides some preliminary clarifications. Section 2 shows that the main motivation for the view is the fact that fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions ar...

The UK National Health Service is undergoing a tremendous IS -led change, the purpose of which is to create a service capable of meeting the demands of the 21 century. The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which persuasive discourse, or rhetoric, influences and affects the adoption of information systems within the health sector. It seeks to explore the ways in which various actors ...

The study of fallacies is at the heart of argumentation studies. In response to Hamblin’s devastating critique of the state of the theory of fallacies in 1970, both formal dialectical and informal approaches to fallacies developed. In the current paper, we focus on an influential informal approach to fallacies, part of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Central to the pragma-dialec...