A Pragma-dialectical Study Of Pragmatic Argumentation In News Commentaries

News commentary is an argumentative discourse through which commentators attempt to express their opinions on newly-happened issues or states of affairs which are of great social importance.In defending for the prescriptive standpoints that concern what to do or what not to do,news commentators are likely to adopt pragmatic argumentation,in which the possible positive or negative results caused by a certain action are pointed out to convince their targeted audience.Current research on pragmatic argumentation in institutional contexts mainly focuses on the legal and political domains.Few researchers pay sufficient attention to pragmatic argumentation used in news commentaries,let alone formulate proper soundness criteria for evaluating its reasonableness.Given this,within the research framework of Pragma-dialectics,this paper analyzes and evaluates the pragmatic argumentation and its extensions typically used in the editorials of the Washington Post published from June,2014 to December,2016.The general aim of this research is to reveal how pragmatic argumentation is used in news commentaries.As shown in the research results,the basic model of pragmatic argumentation typically used in the editorials of the Washington Post can be generalized as:(1)Action X should(not)be carried out(Standpoint);(2)Action X will lead to Result Y(Causal premise);(3)Result Y is positive or negative(Evaluative Premise)and(4)Action X that will lead to a positive or negative Result Y must(not)be carried out(Connecting premise).In argumentative reality,the extensions of pragmatic argumentation could be differentiated according to the different ways of supporting the three premises of pragmatic argumentation.It is observed from the empirical data that three types of argument schemes,i.e.,argumentation by analogy,argumentation from authority and argumentation from opposites,are used to support the causal premise;symptomatic argumentation is used to support the evaluative premise;andargumentation by example is used to support the connecting premise.Based on the institutional preconditions of news commentaries and the general pragma-dialectical soundness criteria for pragmatic argumentation,this study puts forward context-dependent soundness criteria for evaluating pragmatic argumentation used in news commentaries.These soundness criteria take the form of the following three critical questions:(a)Does action X lead to results Y?(b)Is result Y really positive or negative?(c)Is action X feasible? Pursuant to context-dependent soundness criteria,this paper evaluates the use of pragmatic argumentation in editorials in the Washington Post and finds that news commentators may fail to keep the balance between reasonableness and effectiveness and consequently commits derailed fallacies,when they overwhelmingly pursue the persuasive effects of pragmatic argumentation and its extensions.This research is of both theoretical and practical significance.In theory,this study develops a pragma-dialectical research framework for news commentaries,thus expanding the research perspectives and methods of news commentaries.Meanwhile,the scope of institutional contexts of Pragma-dialectics is extended by studying news commentaries.In practice,this study can enlighten domestic news commentators who are responsible for international communication on how to use pragmatic argumentation both reasonably and effectively.More importantly,it provides a crucial analytic tool for readers to interpret news commentaries appropriately and improve their critical thinking abilities.