Traditionally, argumentation research has been dominated by rhetorical studies whose purpose has been to investigate the impact of persuasion on the passive recipient. This kind of argumentation research has mostly concerned itself with analyzing argumentation from the perspective of the speaker of an argumentative message. Researches have pointed to persuasion effective with the universal or particular audience. They have explained why this or that method is more effective than others basing their conclusion on audience and communication situation analyses. However, rhetorical studies can not provide empirical evidence to explain why some persuasion methods work and others don't in a seemingly similar communication situation with the some audience. We believe that pragma-dialectics, an argumentation theory developed by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (Eemeren, van, and Grootendorst 1992) can fill this gap.

English print media are well suited for the purposes of our study. The English print media persuasion dialogue, the most similar to the critical discussion, is manifest in letters to the editor whose authors respond directly either to an editorial or to another letter to the editor. The discussion is focused on one specific topic, and the parties of the dialogue advocate opposite positions on the issue. In this type of persuasion dialogue opposing discourses are separated from each other in time and space since they are written and published on different dates.

The key to analyzing how argumentation is perceived by its recipient is recorded evidence of the recipient's responses to the message containing as a total of two constituents: logical and pragmatic. Having read and understood the message, a message recipient first identifies the message author's claims of arguments supporting the claims, that is performs a logico-semantic analysis of the discourse. Parallel to the logical analysis or following it, the recipient attempts at formulating the arguer's communicative intentions or communicative strategy that is identifies the author's targets of appeal. Thus, at the second stage, the recipient performs a pragma-stylistic analysis of the argumentative discourse.

We believe that differences in the communicative strategies adopted by the opponents in dispute can be accounted for the character of antagonist's perception of the protagonist's discourse argumentation. The main goal of this paper is, therefore, to prove this hypothesis on the basis of a comparative logico-semantic and pragma-linguistic analysis. The second goal of the paper is to demonstrate a dependence of argumentative discourse logical aspect on its pragmatic one, i.e. to show how the arguer's communicative intentions govern his or her choice of arguments and how that is perceived by the message recipient.