Pragmatics and dialectics of rhetorical technique of ad baculum

The paper proposes a pragmatic and dialectical account of ad baculum technique. We claim that this tactic is not entirely inferential as assumed by standard models or, in other words, that at least some aspects of its structure can be best accounted for in terms of properties of speech acts (Austin 1975; van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984) used in the dialogical context (Budzynska and Reed 2011); and ethotic conditions related to the speaker's character (Aristotle 1991). If a robber uses ad baculum and says: “ Your money or your life!”, he performs: (1) a directive act which creates the respondent's obligation to give money to the robber, and (2) a commissive act which indicates -- via the mechanism involving Austinian presuppositions (cf. Witek 2013) -- the proponent's status function.