Major Stakes in Integrated Pragmatics between System and Context: A Critical Examination of the Argumentative Approach of Oswald Ducrot and JeanClaude Anscombre

The argumentative theory of Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Claude Anscombre, commonly known as integrated pragmatics, represents a distinctive and influential school within pragmatic linguistics.Unlike classical rhetoric (Aristotle) or modern rhetorical theory (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca, Meyer), this framework considers argumentation as fundamentally embedded within language itself, rejecting the necessity of external contextual determinants such as social, psychological, or cultural conditions.Integrated pragmatics emphasizes that -speech is imprinted in the utterance, and thus positions argumentation as a linguistic phenomenon situated within semantics and discourse structures.This article critically examines the major stakes of integrated pragmatics between the linguistic system and contextual frameworks.While the theory provides significant tools for understanding the argumentative trajectory of utterances, its methodological exclusion of extra-linguistic factors raises essential theoretical questions.We investigate how this school of thought relates to, diverges from, and potentially complements broader pragmatic theories, including Austin's and Searle's speech act theory, Grice's conversational maxims, and Habermasian communicative rationality.The findings suggest that while integrated pragmatics successfully demonstrates the linguistic grounding of argumentative structures, it risks underestimating the dynamic role of context, speaker intentionality, and recipient interpretation.This creates both limitations and opportunities for further integration with contextualist paradigms in discourse analysis and applied linguistics.