The present article attempts to contribute to a multidisciplinary approach to communication phenomena that emphasizes the interplay among cognition, discourse and society. I propose an examination of the role that these three elements play in argumentation and meta-discourse as a useful starting point for understanding, first, how arguments are formed and second, the role that meta-discursive devices play in this process. In the first two sections I conduct a brief review of literature on the concepts of argumentation and meta-discourse to show how a socio-cognitive approach can enlighten our understanding of both. This model is then applied in the analysis section to look at a plenary session at the European Parliament. I conduct a socio-cognitive discourse analysis, based on which I identify different relevant paths followed by speakers when constructing arguments: (re)framings, (re)definitions, quotations and references to previous events. The findings demonstrate how the different levels of meta-discourse -intra-textual, inter-textual and contextual -are equally relevant for argumentative communication. Through meta-discourse, speakers invoke knowledge about both the ongoing interaction and other past or future communicative events. These other discourses, however, are not only constituted by the actual words uttered, but they encompass the context and situation models (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983) that allow participants to make sense of them. argumentation, discourse analysis, European Parliament, meta-discourse, political communication, social cognition The necessity to examine the ways in which knowledge, discourse and society relate to each other has been pointed out by different authors in several disciplines (cf. Billig, 2003;De Beaugrande, 1997;Van Dijk, 2001). However, communication scholars are still reticent to acknowledge the importance of taking cognition into account when examining all kinds of communicative
Keywords epistemology ontology communication studies paradigm cognition culture Abstract This article is a reflection on the identity of communication research, motivated by what we perceive as an important need for consolidating our field of study. It therefore takes the form of a self-inquiry into the nature of communication research.Whereas the field of communication has expanded and consolidated, its identity continues to be problematic. At this moment, communication studies is defined as a field rather than as a science; we would argue, however, that we have enough features to be something more than a field. This is the central argument of this article: communication research is more than a field but less than a science. Why are we more than a field? Why aren't we a real science? What exactly are the meanings of science and field? We will first consider the importance of the identity issue; second, we will list the main features of communication research in order to justify our identity as something other than a field. Finally, we will propose a multidisciplinary theoretical base for performing communication research in our contemporary period.
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