A Model for Pragmatic Analysis of Dissociation

Abstract

Dissociation is an argumentative technique in which a unitary concept is split up into two non-equivalent concepts. Dissociation has also been studied from a rhetorical perspective, as well as from a pragma-dialectic perspective as a technique of strategicmanoeuvring. Although it has been studied linguistically, the focus in such studies is on its syntactic and semantic structures. Accordingly, this study intends to study dissociation pragmatically in five presidential political texts delivered by Barak Obama. This is done as an attempt to achieve the following aims: (1) identify the pragmatic structure of dissociation and (2) analyzing the rhetorical devices used in dissociation. To achieve the aims of this study, it is hypothesized that: (1) dissociation is composed of speech acts, presupposition, and implicatures and (2) persuasive appeals, repetition, metaphor, overstatement, and manipulation are all actualized in dissociation. The following procedurehas been followed: developing a model which is based on reviewing some pragmatic issues the researchers find to be relevant to the study of dissociation. The findings of the analysis verify the above mentioned hypotheses.Keywords: dissociation, ethos, rhetoric, manipulation