Abstract
This paper examines defendants’ argumentative discourse in the 2008 Nigerian investigative public hearings on the
Federal Capital Territory administration. The data, which consist of nine defendants’ presentations, are analyzed qualitatively,
using a combination of the pragma-dialectical and extended pragma-dialectical theories of argumentation. The findings show that
the hearing panel initially starts of as the institutional protagonist and defendants as the antagonists, and but later serve as
the institutional antagonist and protagonists, respectively. The defendants tend to use analogy and causal argumentation schemes
while employing subordinative and complementary coordinative argumentation structures. The defendants also employ different
strategic maneuvers at different argumentative stages of the critical discussion. Due to the politico-forensic communicative
domain and information-seeking genre of the investigative public hearing discourse, the concluding stage is suspended. Thus, the
study shows the influence of communicative activity type on the argumentative activities in a critical discussion.
Arguments of Statutory Interpretation and Argumentation Schemes
