How to Argue with Questions and Answers: Argumentation Strategies in Parliamentary Deliberation

What is it about?

This article scrutinizes the discursive and argumentative functions of parliamentary questions, which are used as very challenging and face-threatening acts by opposition members of parliament (MPs) to confront and attack government MPs, and especially the Prime Minister (PM) in the notoriously adversarial Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). The aim is to find out how argumentation/counter-argumentation strategies and persuasive/dissuasive techniques are shaped through the co-performance of MPs’ questioning and the PM’s answering practices in PMQs.

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