Constructing the meaning of cultural keywords through argumentation: the case of ‘sustainable’ in fashion

This paper adopts an argumentative perspective to examine how the meaning of the cultural keyword ‘sustainable’ is constructed in the public controversy surrounding sustainable fashion. Following Greco and De Cock (2021), I consider that the different players involved in the controversy present misalignments in their common ground which are related to their divergent understandings of the meaning of sustainable fashion. Therefore, I propose to analyze the definitional arguments advanced by different players in order to reconstruct the implicit definitions of ‘sustainable’ they adopt. To this end, I collect a multi-genre corpus which contains documents published by three players involved in the controversy: social media posts by participants to Fashion Revolution Week, sustainability reports by major fashion brands and communications by the EU Commission. Drawing on an analytical framework combining pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren, 2018) with the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti & Greco, 2019), the analysis shows that each player advances a series of definitional arguments that contain the properties defining the meaning of the keyword ‘sustainable’. As a corollary, the findings reveal that the same endoxon, that is, the same shared cultural premise, is evoked consistently even when the keyword acquires different meanings. At the theoretical level, this paper shows the importance of integrating the analysis of definitional arguments in argumentative studies about cultural keywords. Methodologically, it proposes an innovative method rooted in argumentation for the study of cultural keywords in a polylogical corpus.