Descriptive Analysis of Polylogues

This chapter presents three descriptive analyses of polylogue that draw on three different types of text. Each text – corporate advertorial, news account, and editorial – concerns argumentation about energy production and environmental protection. Using a corporate advertorial previously analyzed by other argumentation scholars, the first polylogical analysis explains key analytic costs born from the practice of making dyadic reductions when reconstructing and analyzing argumentation. The second illustrates the reconstruction of a controversy from a news story that produces a macroscopic representation of the polylogical disagreement management to describe the argumentative relations among players, positions, and places. The third articulates the argumentative strategy of an editorial to manage the polylogical circumstances of its production while offering a novel interpretation about how the strategy seeks to redesign the very polylogue that gave rise to the editorial. These polylogical reconstructions and analyses of argumentation show how to account for the argumentative organization of positions, players, and places involved in the complex practices of disagreement management.