Enthymemes in Dialogue

Abstract

In the previous chapterswe have looked at enthymematic arguments and topoi in the context of pragmatics and interactional linguistics. We have seen that rhetorical reasoning is intimately related to the kind of inferences that are the focus in pragmatics, and that the usage of enthymemes exploits foundational principles of interactional linguistics such as dialogicity and grounding. However, although we have demonstrated the relevance of the enthymeme in interactive linguistics, we have not yet presented a theoretical framework which may be used for precise analyses of enthymematic reasoning. In this chapter we will work our way towards a more detailed account of enthymemes and topoi and the role they play in interaction. First, we will discuss some concepts which are important for the subsequent analysis, and then we will move on to look at some examples. We will take as our point of departure an information state update approach as described by Larsson and Traum (2000) and Larsson (2002), including questions under discussion (qud), as developed by Ginzburg (1994, 1996, 1998), Cooper et al. (2000) and Ginzburg (2012).Wewill look at howwe can account for various types of examples involving enthymemes and topoi. Our analysis will especially focus on the different types of accommodation which are necessary for dialogue participants to be able to draw on rhetorical resources made up of sets of topoi. The formal framework we will use is ttr, a type theory with records Cooper (2005a, 2012, 2016).1 ttr is a rich type theory, which has been successfully employed to account for a range of linguistic phenomena, including ones particular to dialogue (Cooper, 2005b; Ginzburg, 2012; Cooper and Ginzburg, 2015; Lücking, 2016).