Paul Rickman

This book investigates the language used by protagonists in four major political debates in the early history of the United States. The first of these concerns the controversy in the first United States House of Representatives in the summer of 1789 on whether a proposal for a bill of rights should be considered in an expeditious fashion or whether the issue should be left till much later. The second is the principal debate on whether a sedition act should be enacted in July 1798, and the third concerns the enactment of the Logan Act of 1799. The fourth investigates the elections for the Legislature of the State of New York in the spring of 1800, which was the key event affecting the outcome of the presidential election of 1800. In each case there was a sharp disagreement between groups of politicians representing different points of view, and each event was significant from the point of view of the political history of the United States. The authors introduce these four debates, as well as the notion of informal fallacy - taken to designate an argument that is unsatisfactory in some way - before analysing deceptive fallacies and demonstrating how fallacy theory can be used as a critical tool in the examination of political argumentation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political communication, rhetoric and argumentation, US history and politics, and diachronic linguistics, especially diachronic pragmatics.

This book implements a new approach to the study of manipulative tactics in selected Congressional debates in the early history of the United States, highlighting the ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. The identification and analysis of different informal fallacies is central in the approach adopted by the authors, and they privilege the role of covert intentions as a frequent ingredient of manipulation. They also show how different speakers can use different subtypes of the same fallacy in a debate, and investigate the tension between the policy preferences and goals of politicians, and existing laws. The book has been written without jargon, all concepts and terminology from the field of linguistic pragmatics are clearly defined, and it is accessible to the interested layperson wishing to become familiar with manipulative techniques in political rhetoric.

This book showcases fresh research into the underexplored territory of complementation through a detailed analysis of gerunds and ‘to’ infinitives involving control in English. Drawing on large electronic corpora of recent English, it examines subject control in adjectival predicate constructions with ‘scared’, ‘terrified’ and ‘afraid’, moving on to a study of object control with the verbal predicate ‘warn’. In each chapter a case study is presented of a matrix adjective that selects both infinitival and gerundial complements, and a central theme is the application of the Choice Principle as a novel factor bearing on complement selection. The authors argue that it is helpful to view the patterns in question as constructions, as combinations of form and meaning, within the system of English predicate complementation, and convincingly demonstrate how a new gerundial pattern has emerged and spread in the course of the last two centuries. This book will appeal to scholars of semantics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics as well as those with an interest in variation and change in recent English more generally.