Discourses of Freedom of Speech: From the Enactment of the Bill of Rights to the Sedition Act of 1918

Freedom of speech is a tradition distinctive to American political culture, and this book focuses on major debates and discourses that shaped this tradition. It sheds fresh light on key Congressional debates in the early American Republic, developing and applying an approach to fallacy theory suitable to the study of political discourse.

JUHANI RUDANKO is Professor of English at the University of Tampere, Finland. His recent work has focused on the system of English predicate complementation in recent centuries, and on the pragmatic analysis of political discourse in the early American Republic. His previous publications include Changes in Complementation in British and American English.