الفهرس 
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Abstract
This study is about the language used in debates and debating. It is,
therefore, about the language of logic, reasoning and argumentation used to
win a debate. It deals with the linguistic ‘weapons’ – so to speak – that one
should adopt to win a debate. The main objective of this research is to know
how to win a debate whether political/parliamentary and/or
philosophical/ideological. The linguistic tools/techniques, (mainly pragmatic
and partly stylistic) that may enable a debater/speaker to win a certain debate
are reviewed in this study. These tools are evident in the two debates I have
chosen as a corpus for the study, namely the third US presidential McCain-
Obama debate held on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 9 p.m. EDT at
Hofstra University in New York. This debate was on domestic and economic
policy. The second debate that the study undertakes to analyze is the
worldwide famous debate on the topic “Does God Exist?” between DR. Greg
Bahnsen (1948-1995) the Calvinist Philosopher, a presuppositional apologist
and debater, and DR. Stein (1941-1996) the leading atheist philosopher of his
time. This debate is known as the “Great Debate”. It was held on Monday,
February 11, 1985 at the university of California. This study is a research on
what language can precisely do in dissuading or persuading a single opponent
or, sometimes, a group of hearers to make them adopt a specific world view.
How thought is expressed, changed, directed, redirected, formed or reformed
through language is what this study is about. Therefore, the study investigates
the relationship between pragmatics and logic. It defines the logical fallacies
that a debater may fall into, and thus lose a proposition, and may lose, hence, a
whole debate. Logic can be used and/or abused to win a debate.
Search terms used: ‘debate’; ‘Pragmatics’; ‘discourse analysis (DA)’;
‘critical discourse analysis (CDA)’; ‘Conversational Analysis (CA)’; ‘deixis’;
‘presupposition’; ‘speech acts’; ‘implicature’; ‘cooperative principle (CP)’;
‘persuasion’; ‘logical fallacies’