Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

The reason for introducing Toulmin’s rhetoric model here is to draw attention to the
role of the warrant, or as it could equally be called the presupposition. What is treated as war-
rants or presuppositions must in effect, if only ad hoc, be ascribed the status of commonly ac-
cepted. I.e. warrants take the status of socially recognized pre-givens. I shy away from saying
that they reflect the informants’ ‘true’ or ‘subconscious’ attitudes. I don’t see it as impossible
to strike an argument with a preposterous warrant, say, ‘Socrates is immortal because he is a
man (and all men are immortal)’. I do however believe this to be the rare exception and not
something that we would expect repeated by several informants independently.
Informants in an attitude interview rarely present fully elaborate rhetoric models of their
claims – although elaborate narrative responses are very frequent. We would not expect to
find anyone arguing their case by claiming that p, supporting their claim by the data that q on
the warrant that r. However, the warrant for their claims, i.e. statements of agreement or di-
sagreement, can often be deduced from the arguments, and thus give insights into the socially
relevant ways of thinking and talking about issues of language political relevance. I.e. the
warrants present the discursive constructions of language political issues as they are situated
in social interaction.
Some warrants or presuppositions are of particular interest, viz. the presuppositions
that are so resilient that they apparently cannot be avoided in the informants’ arguing. They
can either be accepted or they can be foregrounded and explicitly rejected, but they can appa-
rently not be passed in silence. They are the common sense, layman’s unsubstantiated facts,
that may (or may not) seem banal, depending on how well intone we are with the layman’s
way of arguing.
I will describe a few such presuppositions. The description is in no way an exhausted
list; it is, however, some of the most prevalent presuppositions or discourses in the Danish
informants’ coming to terms with English in Denmark.
English as the default foreign language of the world
It is striking (or maybe not) to which extent English is perceived as the default international
language by the Danish informants. This is not to imply that they believe that everybody in
the world, or even everybody in Denmark, speak English. Neither is it to imply that they do
not perceive other languages to be important or multilingualism as beneficial. But English has
a special status both when foregrounded by the questions and when backgrounded as warrants
for claims about other languages.
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