Jérôme Jacquin

Do we still need an army like in the First World War? An argumentative analysis of a television debate on abolishing compulsory military service in Switzerland

In Swiss semi-direct democracy, citizens are often summoned to the polls. To vote reasonably, they need to be properly informed. The media therefore have the responsibility to provide them with arguments for and against each issue of voting. Here, we focus on argumentation in a television ‘civic debate’ about abolishing compulsory military service. To provide a unified and integrated overview of the debate dynamics, we combine the Dialogical Model of Argumentation and the Argumentum Model of Topics, which share a similar emphasis on the discursive dimension of argumentation. This analysis underlines the importance of linguistic and communicative resources and procedures, without neglecting the macro socio-political environment of the debate.

Multimodal positioning and reference in argumentative talk-in-interaction : Balancing context-dependency and context-independency

Drawing on a descriptive and language-oriented approach to argumentation, this paper explores the multimodal dimension of argumentation in talk-in-interaction by considering the various resources used by an opponent to refer to and position themselves in relation to the target of their opposition, namely the adverse position and/or the person who expressed it. More specifically, it studies how speakers exploit multimodal strategies in order to both maintain their discourse at a high level of generality (orientation to context-independency) and guarantee the indexicality of the position taken in the interaction and the disagreement (orientation to context-dependency). The analysis is based on two data collections documenting settings where all participants are temporally and spatially co-present: (i) a video-recorded corpus of Swiss French public debates and (ii) a video-recorded corpus of New Zealand English management meetings. Examining the role of multimodal orchestration of choices in gaze direction, deictic gestures, and speech in establishing different positions in argumentative events such as public debates or management meetings reveals specific contextual features of the activity types, participation frameworks, and sociolinguistic backgrounds involved in an argument.

IMPACT: A Tool for Transcribing and Commenting on Oral Data, for Teaching, Learning, and Research

Drawing on Digital Humanities as a specific, reflexive way of using new information technology to enhance learning, teaching, and research, this article describes a tool whose development began in 2011 with the goal of helping students, teachers, and researchers to share, transcribe, and comment on audio/video data without having to experience complicated software installation, regular overlap of windows, or strong versioning. From the definition of the requirements to the evaluation of the impact on teaching and research, the article stresses the importance of conceiving of techno-pedagogical tools as dynamic products, whose plasticity is a way to offset teething problems and apparent weaknesses.