The degrees of discursive assumption: contributions for the strategic analysis of discourse

Strategic discourse analysis involves reconstructing the discursive strategies deployed in a corpus, based on the analysis of the recurrent combination of pragmatic-discursive grammatical resources and their association with an interactive purpose. This analysis requires systematic survey and study of different resources, among which are those employed to produce implicit meanings. These resources may vary widely, give rise to presuppositions, implicatures or silencing, and require different processing efforts by the recipient. Due to this complexity, analysis poses a methodological challenge which this article seeks to answer by proposing degrees of discursive assumption, which grade the different classes of implicit meanings in relation to the commitment of the discursive subject and the cognitive effort of the recipient, and suggest that discourse can be characterized by a low, medium or high degree of assumption. To illustrate this proposal, the article also presents the strategic analysis of two concrete discursive substrategies, demonstrating how the degree of assumption is a determinant feature in distinguishing them.