A pragma-stylistic analysis of the linguistic strategies manipulated in presidential and philosophical debates

Abstract EN

This study attempts a pragma-stylistic and pragma- discursive analysis of the strategies or techniques adopted in presidential and philosophical debates.

The study analyses two debates.

First, the Presidential debate between Obama and McCain at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York on October 15, 2008.

The second debate forming the corpus of this study is the debate between Dr.

Greg Bahnsen and Dr.

Gordon Stein, both highly ranked philosophers and debaters of their time.

The second debate is known worldwide as “The Great Debate” entitled “Does God Exist?"” This debate took place on February 11, 1985 at the University of California at Irvine.

The reason for the choice of these two debates is that one of them represents a political debate at a high standard administration in the number-one-advanced-country that holds most of the threads of the political game in the world.

The other debate focuses on the everlasting philosophical religious question: “Does God Exist?” It will be seen that there are Argumentative Strategies in common despite the fact that religious philosophy and politics are worlds apart.

The tools used for analysis are mostly pragmatic, partly stylistic and discursive: deixis, implicature, speech acts, presupposition, Cooperative Principle, persuasion and logical fallacies.