Keeping in touch with pragma-dialectics contains 17 contributions written for Frans van Eemeren on the occasion of his retirement. Publications 'in honor of' are always entertaining for all who are sympathetic to the laureate (let us consider a retirement as a tribute to a long and very fruitful career) but may lack a clear focus that is shared by the majority of the contributors, may lack the weight to be considered as a substantial contribution to the discipline. The somewhat 'empty' title of this volume may support that expectation. That would be a pity! Keeping in touch with pragmadialectics could have carried the much too lengthy subtitle: Exploring the expressiveness and the limits of the extended pragma-dialectic argument theory; a meta-dialectical exercise.

An analysis of a broad sample of Dutch judicial and semi-judicial decisions shows similar structures as the ones Bhatia and Mazzi found before. The question is posed what explains this seemingly unchangeable judicial format. From a perspective of argumentative and communicative efficacy and comprehensibility, the format is certainly not the optimal choice. The explanation is that the format is a sign of an ideology. The format suggests an objectivity of the decision taken. This is actually a myth. This makes a decision to change the format an ideological one.

A pragma-dialectical analysis departs from an idealized model of a well-organized, fully explicit argumentative discussion. Some argumentative activity types come closer to this ideal than others. It is useful and important to apply the ideal model to reconstruct relatively well-organized and explicit practices as is done for example in argumentation in legal proceedings. But it is great fun to explore what happens when you confront the seemingly anarchistic and chaotic practices of Internet political forum discussions with such a model, at least when you do this with the subtlety and intelligence of Marcin Lewinski. He reports his findings in a wellwritten, very interesting study.

An argumentative text can be reconstructed as an argumentative discussion between a protagonist and an antagonist. However, such a text is usually not a literal report of a discussion. It is the author of the text who determines how issues are presented, how claims are modeled, how the development of the discussion is presented. Especially when a text has embedded discourse voices that can fulfill the roles of protagonist or antagonist, the author of the text can strongly suggest a specific assignment, suppressing alternatives. In this article examples are presented that show how an author exploits linguistic means—a strategic choice of causal connectives—to suggest a specific reconstruction. The question is raised whether a derailment of this behavior of the author should be characterized as committing the fallacy of the straw man.

In the deliberative genre there is a complex ‘playground’ of choices to present a recommendation; a rhetorician has to determine his or her position. Relevant dimensions are the coerciveness of the recommendation and the strength of its justification, but also the presentation format, varying from prototypical narrative to prototypical argumentative. In different contexts this playground seems to be exploited in different ways and employed with different intensity. It is argued that this can best be understood in terms of different ideas about the management of the audience’s face and in terms of different concepts of rationality thatprevail in specific socio-cultural contexts.