Abstract
In the wake of research on linguistic resources of argumentation (Doury, 2018; van Eemeren Houtlosser, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2007), this chapter considers the argumentative nature and rhetorical potential of the expression “everyone/everybody knows P”, which is likely to be used to fulfil a justificatory purpose in appeals to majority in the form of ad populum arguments (Godden, 2008). In this contribution, we draw on a rhetoric-pragmatic framework (Oswald & Herman, 2016) to identify the linguistic and cognitive underpinnings of argumentative resources in order to account for a range of persuasive effects in argumentation. There is something argumentatively odd about the expression “everybody knows that P” under consideration here. Since the epistemic modality encoded by the verb “to know” and the universal quantifier highlight that P is already known and shared, one could indeed wonder about the relevance of P as an argument: can an argument with little (if no) informative relevance serve a justificatory purpose? Since this seems to be the case, as the argument is widely used, we will show that the oddity can be explained away by looking at the pragmatic and rhetorical import of the expression.
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Notes
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The exploratory nature of this contribution, which aims to illustrate how a rhetoric-pragmatic framework may be instrumental to mapping and accounting for existing usages of the expression “everybody knows P”, explains that we set out to collect different argumentative usages instead of constituting a large and systematically organized corpus around this particular expression. In other words, in this phase we are not aiming for a quantitative analysis, but for a qualitative illustration of usages in different communicative situations or genres. This in turn establishes a preliminary frame for further empirical and experimental investigations. To this end, we thus collected 28 examples from Internet websites, Twitter accounts and online newspapers.
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In this paper we take the terms “speaker” and “writer” to be interchangeable in the sense that both are responsible for a (respectively spoken and written) utterance, that is, an act of enunciation. We therefore ask the reader for some indulgence when we refer to authors of written statements as speakers throughout the paper.
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https://gvwire.com/2018/07/19/say-it-aint-so-devin-has-congress-turned-you-into-a-fat-cat/. Note that our interpretation would be different in a different context. The proverbial form, in this American example, comes from a well-known American propaganda slogan during World War II. The speaker makes it clear that this cultural background should in any case be shared by the whole community.
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The Joint Statement of the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security, which represents 17 intelligence services, stated the following on October 7, 2016: “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” Available at: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national.
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We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out and for allowing us to clarify that establishing the truth of the conclusion of the ad populum argument might not always be its rhetorical purpose, even if it structurally does so.
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“I find that the government has not made enough money available for this in successive budgets and [that] the impact is always on the NHS” does indeed seem to correspond to an opinion. By contrast,??“I find that I am a human being” (barring stylistic or ornamental rhetorical effects) seems rather odd, and thus would suggest that “I am a human being” is not an opinion.
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Trump repeatedly used the expression “witch-hunt” to denote the Mueller investigation in his tweets.
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Note here as well how the pragmatic enrichment of the referring quantifier is crucial for the success of the rhetorical strategy.
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Herman, T., Oswald, S. (2021). Everybody Knows that There Is Something Odd About Ad Populum Arguments. In: Boogaart, R., Jansen, H., van Leeuwen, M. (eds) The Language of Argumentation. Argumentation Library, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52907-9_16
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