A Pragmatic Study of Fallacy in David Cameron’s Political Speeches

Abstract

Fallacy as a derailment of strategic maneuvering can be defined as the process of issuing a defective argument (when subjected to certain criteria) to support and strengthen a previously issued one for purposes of persuasion. However, fallacy is a broad topic that has been approached from different perspectives. Several studies have attempted to tackle it pragmatically. Yet, those attempts have suffered from many gaps and drawbacks which have characterized them as insufficient accounts in this regard. Many pragmatic aspects related to fallacy, like its pragmatic structure and the strategies used for issuing it, have not been given their due attention. Hence, this work has set itself the task of dealing with this problem. Precisely, it concerns itself with the aims of finding out the pragmatic structure and pragmatic strategies of fallacy in David Cameron’s, the British prime minister, war and electoral political speeches. In association with these aims, there is a development of a pragmatic model for the analysis of these two aspects in the speeches scrutinized. This model is built upon several models introduced by several scholars in addition to some contributions made by the researchers themselves. The validity of the developed model is tested by means of analyzing fourteen fallacious situations taken from David Cameron’s war and electoral political speeches. The analyses conducted have proved that the model developed is workable. Besides, they have yielded various results among which is that fallacy is a process composed of various stages. Each stage is distinct for its pragmatic components and strategies.