Slovenian Lectures

In December 1991 Oswald Ducrot gave a series of five lectures on the nature of his theory of argumentation in the language-system to postgraduate students of Discourse Studies at the ISH, Institute for the Study of Humanities in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Since, on the one hand, there is growing interest for Prof. Ducrot’s theory, while on the other hand very few of his works were translated into English (the modern lingua franca, whether we like it or not), we decided to republish these lectures in digital form under the title Slovenian lectures - Introduction into Argumentative Semantics (the first, bilingual edition appeared in 1996, and is no longer available). The lectures were translated by dr. Sebastian McEvoy.

The Slovenian lectures have been conceived as an introduction to the theory of argumentation in the language-system, and in Prof. Ducrot’s opinion don’t need a special introduction. Let me therefore just point out that in the last ten years prof. Ducrot, in collaboration with Marion Carel, has been developing a new version of the theory of argumentation in the language-systeme, a theory of semantic blocks.

A lot of people collaborated at this publication; my special thanks, as the editor of the volume, go to dr. Sebastian McEvoy, Danielle Charonnet, Peter Altshul, Simona Suhadolnik, Marjeta Doupona-Horvat, Zoja Skušek, and especially to Jonatan Vinkler who made this digital publication possible.

Of course, Prof. Ducrot’s lectures, as well as this publication would not have been possible without the financial support from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia and the Educational Research Institute.

Igor Ž. Žagar