Pragmatics and discourse analysis, by Margarida Bassols Puig

The subordinates strengthen the illocutionary force of the directive, they round it out and complement it. However, in the discourse generated in a political debate, as strange as it may seem, we find few instances, because the orator has little time to formulate, and this feature greatly increases the informational density of the intervention.

4. Conclusion

What we have presented here, then, is a rapid approximation to the complexity of discourse, plus a series of concepts, taken from pragmatic theory and the theory of argumentation which may make the analysis clearer. We have seen that the concessive orientation is the most habitual in the type of political debate analysed here, followed by the consecutive orientation. The conclusive mode, on the other hand, is not found so frequently, except in the chunks of monologue, the parts of the discourse which the speakers had partially prepared -occurring in the first few minutes and closing minutes of the debate. The pragmatic markers that work to indicate these orientations constitute a restricted list, and in any case may be omitted. Comparative analysis of the argumentative orientations in the speech of the different politicians analysed in this article, may make it considerably clearer to us, why they are more, or less, effective.

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Margarida Bassols i Puig
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
margarida.bassols@uab.es