Emotions in argumentative narration. The case of the Charlie Hebdo attack

Abstract

This paper studies emo-tional inferencing triggered by emo-tion terms, using Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The corpus, in French, is an excerpt of a video-recorded testimony in which a middle school teacher evokes her experience of being in class the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, thus presenting a case of argumentation in context. The analy-sis focuses on the argumentative structure and on the rhetorical strate-gies that trigger emotional inferenc-ing. The emotional inferencing derives from a Locus of Ontological Implication, which links a situation and an emotion (and vice-versa), while the culture-bound elements tend to be part of the endoxon.