Šolsko polje, letnik XX, številka 5-6, 2009: Vloga ... - Pedagoški inštitut

TOPOI IN CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS71Claim EU enlargement should be stopped/slowed down …What have you got to go on?Datum EU enlargement costs too much money.How do you get there?Warrant If a specific action costs too much money, one shouldperform actions that diminish the costs.Is that always the case?Rebuttal No, but it generally/usually/very often is. Unlessthere are other reasons/arguments that are stronger/more important … In that case the warrant doesn’t apply.Then you can’t be sodefinite in your claim?Qualifier True: it is only usually… so.BackingThe history (of EU) shows…But then, what makes youthink at all that if a specificaction costs too much moneyone should perform actions…If the analysis (text analysis, discourse analysis) would proceed in thisway 13 - applying the above scheme to concrete pieces of discourse eachtime it wants to find the underlying topoi - the »lists of topoi in the background«would become unimportant, useless and obsolete (as they, actually,already are). Text mining (if I may borrow this expression from computationallinguistics) would bring text’s (or discourse’s) own topoi to thesurface, not the prefabricated ones. And these topoi, which would be theproduct of a concrete empirical analysis, could then indeed be comparedwith a (possible) list of »historical« topoi in the background. For contrastiveor other reasons, depending on the analysis in question.Therefore, if DHA really wants to make choices at each point in theresearch itself, and at the same time make these choices transparent (as itclaims it does), taking all these steps (in finding the topoi) would be theonly legitimate thing a credible and competent analysis should do. If DHAwants to incorporate argumentation analysis in its agenda, of course.