This master thesis explores and analyses the linguistic and discursive mechanisms of argumentation in the debate of the Honorary Senate of the Argentine nation on the legalisation of abortion.
The theoretical part of the thesis first introduces the basic premises of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, argumentation in language, and defines the mechanisms of argumentation. This is followed by a placement in the historical context, highlighting the central emphases of Argentine political history, the course of feminism, and the struggle for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina.
The empirical part consists of an analysis of eight examples of political discourse from the debate of the Honorable Senate of the Argentine Nation, namely from 29/12/2020, when the law legalizing abortion was passed in Argentina. The sample of analysed texts includes four speeches by senators who supported the law legalising abortion and four speeches by senators who opposed the law. In these cases, the focus is on the specific linguistic and discursive mechanisms that are key to the argumentative structure of each speech, namely: the lexical units of argumentation, interrogative and exclamatory sentences, argumentative connectors and operators, and ironic implicatures and metaphors.
The aim of the master's thesis is analysing the most common elements as carriers of argumentation, and determinating whether personal or impersonal structures predominate in the analysed speeches, and in which cases one or the other predominates.
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