Speaking to a Divided Audience: The Ambiguous Strategic Design of Figured Discourse

Abstract

Classical rhetoricians theorized on ways to communicate a double message to a divided audience. This they called ‘figured discourse’. This paper examines the argumentative construction of such a double-layered discourse by connecting this classical concept to the recent pragma-dialectical notion of strategic design. Figured discourse is ambiguously designed and, therefore, enables two different argumentative interpretations, as is illustrated with an example of a figured discourse in a Dutch sermon delivered during the Second World War.