To Örebro University

We argue that the evaluation of multimodal arguments needs to take into account the semiotic resources used to communicate them as well as the context in which they are produced and interpreted. Thus, in addition to the critical questions pertaining to the scheme that help assess the internal cogency of the argument and thereby its reasonableness, we propose asking questions regarding the cognitive and rhetorical dimensions of the argument in order to assess how effectively the semiotic design helps the addressee to process it and how effectively it is adjusted to the audience and context. To illustrate our proposal for a three-dimensional evaluation of multimodal argumentation, we analyze comparatively three environmental campaign posters that present in varying degrees of semiotic complexity the negative consequences of not taking action regarding the protection of the environment.

The chapter reviews the extent to which contemporary Greek scholarship in humanities and social sciences makes use of rhetorical categories as relevant descriptive and analytical tools. It proposes revisiting two classical rhetorical concepts, namely topoi and endoxa, in order to illustrate their descriptive and explanatory potential for the analysis of political discourse characterized by adversariness, polyphony, and the need to create communion. To illustrate this theoretical and methodological proposal, two fragments of parliamentary discourse are analysed by combining the insights of Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The fragments are from the speeches that the government and opposition leaders made during the parliamentary debate on the signing of the first memorandum of understanding between Greece and the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in May 2010.

In this paper, we analyze the front pages of mainstream Greek newspapers with the highest circulation reporting the official result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Our analysis seeks to extract the standpoints and arguments that circulated in the Greek mainstream press on that day by studying the headlines and visuals on the front page. We study the front page not merely as an informative genre but crucially as an argumentative one, where the arguments can be reconstructed with the help of tools from argumentation theory combined with principles from multimodal critical discourse analysis. The proposed approach makes it possible to compare how the different ideological orientations in the Greek public sphere were steered by the representation of this piece of news. We show that, despite their ideological background, the newspapers under study converge to the construction of Brexit as a menacing phenomenon that puts the EU integration to the test and, as such, as an event that should have been avoided.

In the development of a new program at the School of Humanities at Örebro University, the subjects involved (English language, Rhetoric and Swedish), proposed the implementation of a pedagogical model that hitherto has been underused in the humanities, namely case-based learning. Although well established in other fields, case pedagogy has not been tested in the humanities to any large extent. In this report, we first describe the three subjects’ take on case pedagogy along with our experiences from its implementation in the program. Next, we discuss the criteria we deem essential for success in this pedagogical model; these four criteria that comprise the Harvard model are authenticity, open-endedness, applicability of theory, and implementation that supports learning objectives. 

In summary, we emphasize that these criteria should not be considered as a fixed template; instead, we propose that they be regarded as a source of inspiration and let applicable fields of practice and the discipline itself dictate which criteria are relevant.

Visual rhetoric is more often than not identified with the search for patterns of visual form and content which convey meaning in ways that resemble the meaning construed by known rhetorical figures. Despite the numerous proposals for the classification of figures construed verbally or visually, there has been no systematic attempt to account for the different ways in which these may contribute to the argumentative structure of persuasive messages. In this article, the author studies comparatively the figures of metaphor, antithesis and allusion, cued visually or verbo-visually in the multimodal genre of front covers. He starts from the assumption that the front cover constitutes a multimodal argument in the sense that it invites the reader to buy the specific issue on the grounds of the featured story and the stance that the editors express over it. The goal is to identify the semiotic configurations that distinguish one figure from the other, and to establish conditions under which these figures can be shown to contribute meaning that serves the argument conveyed by the front cover.

Studies on conflict talk and disagreement in everyday argumentative interactions adopt various theoretical perspectives ranging from social psychology and interactional sociolinguistics to ethnography and conversation analysis. However, no systematic reference is made to theoretical frameworks for the study of argumentative discourse, which link the expression of disagreement to what arguments are and how they relate to the rational and pragmatic organization of verbal communication. At the same time, argumentation theorists hardly ever pay close attention to politeness considerations that govern the arguers’ moves in face-to-face argumentative exchanges. In this paper, I propose a classification of disagreement moves by taking into account their functional and linguistic properties and by relating these to face considerations that participants are assumed to have when engaging in an argumentative discussion. Such a classification can be of use in the analysis and evaluation of disagreements in both their rational and social dimensions. Examples from dialogue scenes in fiction films are used to illustrate the proposed distinctions.

Recourse to argument schemes and to their accompanying critical questions can provide a fruitful way of assessing visual and multimodal arguments. The prospects of such an approach are discussed based on analyses of spoof ads. Their spoofing strategy amounts to raising critical questions about the argument scheme employed in the original advertisement. How can the various aspects of the verbal and the visual mode cue critical questions and what is their overall contribution to the evaluation of multimodal arguments?