How to Argue with Questions and Answers: Argumentation Strategies in Parliamentary Deliberation

Abstract

While apparently designed to request information, parliamentary questions are the most challenging and face-threatening acts, used argumentatively by opposition members of parliament (MPs) to confront and attack government MPs, and especially the Prime Minister (PM) in the notoriously adversarial Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). By contextually, discursively and rhetorically articulating varying degrees of relevance and persuasiveness, questioning and answering practices serve as basic debating tools for MPs, whose main parliamentary role and responsibility consist of holding the government and the PM accountable. The aim of this paper is to explore how argumentation/counter-argumentation strategies and persuasive/dissuasive techniques are shaped through the co-performance of MPs’ questioning and the PM’s answering practices in PMQs. To better capture the effects of the shifting dynamics of polemical question-answer exchanges between political adversaries, the present analysis is based on the cross-fertilization of pragma-rhetoric and argumentation theory. The commonalities and complementarities of these approaches have been used to identify and problematize the higher or lower degrees of argumentation at the question-answer interface in terms of valid or fallacious reasoning patterns in three categories of strategic questions: yes/no questions, wh-questions and disjunctive questions.