The Rhetorical Structure of Argumentative Discourse as Expressed in Israeli Supreme Court Verdicts

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present and discuss the role and function of structure in argumentative discourse as expressed in Israeli Supreme Court Verdicts with a review of the literature from ancient Greece to modern times. This article includes a presentation of both Brewer’s and Roe’s models of text classification and presents the four types of text according to the classic classification, focusing primarily on the argumentative-persuasive text with particular attention to its unique rhetorical structure. The rhetorical structure of a text has crucial importance because it enables one to see an aspect of the rhetorical analysis. Graphic representation of the rhetorical structure of argumentative discourse by means of flowcharts is also discussed and examples are presented in the appendix to this article.