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Argumentative misalignments in the controversy surrounding fashion sustainability

  • Greco, Sara Istituto di argomentazione, linguistica e semiotica (IALS), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • De Cock, Barbara Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
    15.01.2021
Published in:
  • Journal of pragmatics. - 2021, vol. 174, no. March, p. 55-67
Misalignment in the opening stage
Agentivity
Definition
Argumentation analysis
Polylogue
Sustainable fashion
English In light of the ongoing public controversy surrounding fashion sustainability, this paper sets out to identify misalignments that relate to the definitions of sustainable fashion. It does so by examining the discourse of different agents in this polylogical argumentation - fashion companies and the European Parliament as well as citizens, small brands and NGOs - as revealed through documents and tweets published online. Our findings show misalignments in the opening stage of the argumentative discussion at the level of explicit and implicit definitions of sustainability as well as in how the agents responsible are discursively portrayed. We argue that the existence of these misalignments may explain the ongoing controversy surrounding sustainable fashion: the different actors do not share univocal starting points and representations of this phenomenon. Methodologically, this paper also advances research on argumentative polylogues, by demonstrating a method for comparing argumentation by different actors using different data sources.
Language
  • English
Classification
Language, linguistics
License
CC BY-NC-ND
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1319289
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