How to Argue with Questions and Answers: Argumentation Strategies in Parliamentary Deliberation
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The text is highly interesting and insightful. I have only four small suggestions for revision:
(1) Please make even more clear that "decision-making deliberation" is - unfortunately - no longer relevant in modern parliaments, since the relevant political decision have already been made in the pre-parliamentary space. You will hardly ever observe negotiations and resolutions of disagreements in parliamentary debates.
(2) Please rethink the concept of representativeness and specify that the selection of your examples does not rely on statistical criteria. Maybe you can replace the term „representative“ by „typical“?
(3) Please explain within an additional paragraph what characterises the pragma-rhetorical approach and how it relates to or is distinguished from pragma-dialectics and informal logics.
(4) Please insert concrete page numbers wherever it is possible. The majority of the references lack specific page numbers. Therefore, it is impossible for readers to verify the exact text passages referenced.
Detailed comments are to be found in the attached file.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
First of all, I want to thank the two reviewers for their pertinent comments and insightful suggestions. Their recommendations have been really helpful in revising my text and refining certain analytical explanations.
Reviewer 1:
(1) Please make even more clear that "decision-making deliberation" is - unfortunately - no longer relevant in modern parliaments, since the relevant political decision have already been made in the pre-parliamentary space. You will hardly ever observe negotiations and resolutions of disagreements in parliamentary debates.
On p. 2 of the revised version of my article I have provided clearer explanations regarding the concept of deliberation as it is used in my analysis.
On p. 4 of the review file I explained that I use the term in that particular discursive context with a meaning that is different from the more frequently used concept of deliberation processes. In the respective case "deliberative" refers specifically to one of the three rhetorical genres, i.e. epideictic, forensic and deliberative.
(2) Please rethink the concept of representativeness and specify that the selection of your examples does not rely on statistical criteria. Maybe you can replace the term „representative“ by „typical“?
Following this very pertinent comment, I have replaced “representative”, which was not the right term with “typical”, which is an appropriate term.
(3) Please explain within an additional paragraph what characterises the pragma-rhetorical approach and how it relates to or is distinguished from pragma-dialectics and informal logics.
On p. 4 of the revised version of my article I have added a paragraph where I explain the major characteristic features of the pragma-rhetorical approach.
(4) Please insert concrete page numbers wherever it is possible. The majority of the references lack specific page numbers. Therefore, it is impossible for readers to verify the exact text passages referenced.
As I mentioned in my response in the review file, I follow the scholarly practice according to which page numbers are indicated only in the case of direct quotations, not when I refer in general to ideas, theories, etc. expressed throughout a certain publication.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The author looks at the strategic uses of and responses to yes/no questions, wh-questions and disjunctive questions in the British House of Commons and discusses seven recent examples in detail. This paper is relevant and well-written. I only have two minor suggestions for the author to consider:
1) It would be helpful it the data were described in more detail (e.g., what is the exact size of the dataset, how the ‘high levels of parliamentary confrontation’ were identified, etc.)
2) It would be interesting to see the results of this study linked with some other strands of literature dealing with adversarial political rhetoric in the British context. This would allow to show even more clearly how the findings concerning these specific question-answer exchanges might be useful to a range of researchers who study conflict and persuasion in political discourse within other traditions and settings, such as:
Harris, S. (2001). Being politically impolite: extending politeness theory to adversarial political discourse. Discourse & society, 12(4), 451-472.
Mohammed, D. (2008). Institutional insights for analysing strategic manoeuvring in the British Prime Minister’s Question Time. Argumentation, 22(3), 377-393.
Murphy, J. (2014). (Im) politeness during Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK Parliament. Pragmatics and Society, 5(1), 76-104.
Hansson, S. (2018). Analysing opposition–government blame games: Argument models and strategic maneuvering. Critical Discourse Studies, 15(3), 228-246.
Waddle, M., Bull, P., & Böhnke, J. R. (2019). “He is just the nowhere man of British politics”: personal attacks in Prime Minister’s Questions. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 38(1), 61-84.
Blumenau, J., & Lauderdale, B. E. (2022). The Variable Persuasiveness of Political Rhetoric. American Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12703
Author Response
First of all, I want to thank the two reviewers for their pertinent comments and insightful suggestions. Their recommendations have been really helpful in revising my text and refining certain analytical explanations.
My feedback to the two reviewers’ separate comments and suggestions is provided below (in blue).
Reviewer 2:
1) It would be helpful it the data were described in more detail (e.g., what is the exact size of the dataset, how the ‘high levels of parliamentary confrontation’ were identified, etc.)
For the purposes this study, which is not quantitative, specifying the actual size of the dataset would be hardly relevant.
2) It would be interesting to see the results of this study linked with some other strands of literature dealing with adversarial political rhetoric in the British context. This would allow to show even more clearly how the findings concerning these specific question-answer exchanges might be useful to a range of researchers who study conflict and persuasion in political discourse within other traditions and settings, such as: ……
Taking into consideration the fact that my article is directly concerned with question-answer argumentation in British parliamentary discourse, as well as the constraints regarding its length, I have focused on the specialized literature on this particular topic.
I have used several of the suggested references in other publications, for examples in articles or chapters dealing with strategies of (im)politeness in parliamentary discourse. But this topic was not touched upon in this article, and therefore the reference to (im)politeness studies would be hardly relevant.
In response to one of the parenthetical observations in 1) related to ‘high levels of parliamentary confrontation’, I have added the following suggested reference (that I was already familiar with):
Waddle, Maurice, Peter Bull and Jan R. Böhnke. 2019. “He is just the nowhere man of British politics”: Personal attacks in Prime Minister’s Questions. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 38(1): 61-84.
