Investigating Pragmatic Argumentation In Public Policy Discourse

Public policy discourse as a text type is not only the presentation of policy advocates,but also a social speech act in which policy makers are highly involved.Although public policy discourse is presented in the form of monologue,it is in essence a kind of social interaction between the policy makers and the audience.In order to persuade the audience to accept the policy,policy makers need to provide crafted arguments to support their standpoint of implementing a certain policy,and at the same time,they must fully consider and respond to the audiences’ possible doubts or criticisms.From this point of view,public policy discourse is actually argumentative,however,the study of public policy discourse from the perspective of argumentation has not yet received adequate attention.It is noteworthy that in public policy discourse,policy makers tend to use pragmatic argumentation to achieve ideal argumentative goals.When using pragmatic argumentation,policy makers will support the implementation of the policy by pointing out its desirable consequences through various kinds of arguments.In view of this,this research,within the framework of Pragma-Dialectics,explores the use of pragmatic argumentation in public policy discourse.Specifically,this research attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the institutional preconditions for public policy discourse? How could they constrain the use of pragmatic argumentation in public policy discourse?(2)What types and variants of pragmatic argumentation are prototypically employed in public policy discourse under the constraint of institutional preconditions?(3)How do the policy makers maneuver strategically by using pragmatic argumentation to convince the audience?This research selects Central No.1 Documents(2004-2020)as its research data.Central No.1 Document refers to the first document issued by the CPC Central Committee every year,which has a guiding status to instruct our country’s endeavor throughout the year.The analysis of the documents is helpful to understand how the government constructs the discourse system of national governance through the texts.The research results show that public policy discourse can be viewed as the communicative activity that occurs in the political domain.The significance of this activity type lies in that it provides effective and sufficient information about relevant policy issues to the potential audiences,and to strengthen the acceptability of the policy.In the meantime,the institutional preconditions of public policy discourse will stipulate the content,structure and rules for the formulation of public policy texts,and define the space for the strategic maneuvering of pragmatic argumentation in it.Secondly,the pragmatic argumentation supporting the standpoint that “the policy should be implemented” can be summarized as: policy X should be implemented because the implementation of policy X will lead to desirable consequence Y.If the implementation of policy X can lead to desirable consequence Y,then the policy should be implemented.In practical applications,there are mainly four variants of pragmatic argumentation in public policy discourse,namely,the extended argumentation by “problem”,“inherency”,“solvency” and “practicality”.The“problem” type defends the necessity of policy implementation by explaining the serious problems that need to be solved;the “inherency” type believes that the cause of the problems is inherent in the status quo,and policy makers must make it clear that the problems can only be solved by substantial changes;the “solvency” type needs to clarify to what extent the policy can solve the problems;the “practicality”type will demonstrate the possibility that the policy can be put into action.When designing the four types of pragmatic argumentation,policy makers usually lay out supporting details based on specific critical questions closely related to each type,and reconcile the reasonableness and effectiveness of the pragmatic argumentation from“topical potential”,“presentational devices” and “audience demand” under the constraints of the institutional context of public policy discourse.Theoretically,this research goes beyond the traditional research paradigm of public policy analysis and provides a pragma-dialectical approach to policy discourse research.At the same time,it expands the research scope of institutional context,and enriches the understanding of pragmatic argumentation in public policy discourse.At the practical level,through the analysis of the argumentative pattern prototypically employed in public policy discourse,it provides practical guidance for policy making,especially for the attempt to strike a balance between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness.