Towards a Model of Pragmatic Justification

Abstract

It is stated that justification may be a prerequisite for any claim that is made, whether the claim is about a weather forecast by a meteorologist, an accusation of negligence by an employee against his or her employers, or a doctor's diagnosis. Justification denotes a communicative event which is meant to compensate for the violation of a certain norm or to enable recipient to understand better something unpredicted or disputed.Although justification is ubiquitous in everyday life, it has so far remained relatively unexplored. This study provides the first investigation of justification as a communicative event and from a pragmatic point of view. It paper attempts to develop a model which can be used for the analysis of data in relation to pragmatic justification. Additionally, the workability of the model will be tested against data collected from political speeches produced by Tony Blair and Barack Obama.