Language, reason and education

Studies in honor of Eddo Rigotti

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• Publisher: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783035202687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language as reason represents the unifying theme of this multifaceted reflection on Eddo Rigotti's scientific contribution offered by his students and colleagues on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Spanning argumentation theory, linguistics, psychology, semiotics and communication sciences, the volume reflects Rigotti's generous personality and his trajectory of semiotician, philosopher, linguist and specialist in argumentation studies. Language as an instrument of communication with semiotic peculiarities is considered at different levels in which it manifests traces of reason at work. This means considering how reality reveals itself by means of language and how the semiotic character of language structures is used by people to enable joint actions and change the natural and social world. Particularly in focus is the realm of argumentation, that is of those joint actions where people exchange reasons in various communities, fora and markets in view of understanding and practical deliberation. To argumentation Eddo Rigotti devoted all his research efforts in recent years, with a keen sense of its intrinsic educational value and a sincere care for fostering the development of the argumentative mind.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Listening and silence in communication: reflections on two texts
• The evocative and transformative power of words
• Intercomprehension and receptive skills in Italian for enhancing the individual’s multilingual repertoire in quadrilingual Switzerland
• Good reasons for good manners. An argumentative foundation of courtesy in Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo
• The narrative structure of dreams
• Metaphors and metaforms: interconnecting language, culture and cognition
• Analyzing contextualized argumentative discourse: strengthening the relationship between Rigotti’s aspirations and pragma-dialectics
• Arguments for forgiveness. A pragmatic-argumentative note on apologies
• Argumentation in institutional founding documents.The case of Switzerland’s Foedus Pactum
• Do languages “really” exist or are they mere discursive constructions?
• Argumentation schemes and topical relations
• Attention in context: from Ancient rhetoric to contemporary communication sciences
• About the functions of the passive
• Causality and non-iconic order
• Children and knowledge-oriented argumentation. Some notes for future research
• Extending presuppositions to discourse: a tribute to Eddo Rigotti
• A possible reflection of the painter (Jan van Eyck) in the Ghent Altarpiece
• Argumentation, causality and narrativity in Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean