Three’s a lucky #

Workshop Poster – Copyright: Franz Frommann, 2025

For the third time now, argumentation and multimodality scholars team up to discuss issues around multimodal argumentation. After Salzburg (2023) and Groningen (2024), this year we’re returning to Salzburg for another two-day workshop on 11 and 12 December (2025). It will focus on the gains and shortcomings of various approaches to the reconstruction, evaluation and interpretation of multimodal arguments.

Argumentation scholars have adopted different approaches to the reconstruction and evaluation of arguments. Despite intense recent work, the methods for handling multimodally construed argumentative discourse are only just emerging. In this context, the workshop showcases tried-and-tested and novel analytical rationales applicable to instances of multimodal argumentation. A concomitant question the workshop asks is about the differences between two major types of argumentation, face-to-face conversational and technologically mediated, e.g., print and film. (Workshop Description, Hartmut STÖCKL)

This year’s workshop features two novelties: It is co-organized by the universities of Salzburg (Jana PFLAEGING and myself) and Groningen (Jan Albert VAN LAAR, Janina WILDFEUER). And it brings together senior and junior researchers. The workshop will also be one of the kick-off meetings for an argumentation project entitled ‚The Normativity of Multimodal Argumentation‘ and headed by Jan Albert VAN LAAR (funded by the Dutch Science Foundation).

Insectarium Museum Montréal, 2021, Bruno Carvalho & Diego Franco, Canada – Lürzer’s Archive 01/2021.120

Some presentations will work with an example from my travel/leisure ad corpus, now known as the ‚Dragonfly example‘. While seemingly simply, it raises relevant questions: Is this a gamma or an alpha argument? Is it a simple argument with a verbal (and perhaps a visual) premise or are the argumentative workings of the ad much more complex? What role does the image play in construing the argument? Are the visual rhetorical operations in the image relevant for the argumentation scheme (or lever)? What kinds of inferences and pragmatic/semiotic operations go into the construction of the argument?To what extent can this concrete example serve as a model for argumentation in promotional discourse generally? …

The presentations of the workshop address multimodal argumentation from a number of perspectives, always with a firm footing in empirical work and illustration on samples/corpora. While the workshop schedule is still not official yet, the talks cluster in four larger domains: I models for argument reconstruction in different media (mainly based on informal logic, pragma-dialectics, and (M)ATIP), II multimodal discourse semantics and argument structure, III cognitive and semiotic pragmatics, and IV argument reception and comprehension. The tight thematic interconnectedness of all talks promises a gainful and inspiring workshop. Hopefully: lucky number, lucky (pre-Xmas) stars.