Assistant professor

Fabrizio Macagno (Ph.D. in linguistics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, 2008) works as an assistant professor in the departments of Philosophy and Communication at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His current research, between the fields of Linguistics and Philosophy of language, is focused on the natural patterns of argument (argumentation schemes), the persuasive use of emotive language, and on the dialectical dimension of discourse implicitness. The theoretical framework that he has been developing together with Douglas Walton and other colleagues is used in his more empirical studies, aiming at analysing medical, educational, and legal discourse. He is coordinating a national project on the use of discourse analysis and argumentation tools for the study of medical discourse in diabetes care (METACARE) and a European project on dialogue and argumentation in the classroom (DIALLS), of which he is the coordinator for the Portuguese team. He is author of several papers on definition, informal fallacies, argumentation schemes, and dialogue theory published in major international peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Argumentation, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Informal Logic, and Pragmatics and Cognition. His most important publications include the books Argumentation Schemes (CUP 2008), Emotive Language in Argumentation (CUP 2014), and Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation (Springer 2017).

•  Macagno, F., & Rossi, M. G. (2019). Metaphors and problematic understanding in chronic care communication. Journal of Pragmatics, 151, 103–117.
• Macagno, F. (2018). Assessing relevance. Lingua, 210–211, 42–64.
• Macagno, F. (2018). Evidence and presumptions for analyzing and detecting misunderstandings. Pragmatics & Cognition, 24(2), 263–296.
• Walton, D., Reed, C., & Macagno, F. (2008). Argumentation schemes. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

You can find all the publications here