This thesis is a comparative pragmatic study of the aspect of argument in the works of George Orwell in "Animal Farm" (1945) and that of Margaret Atwood in "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985). It explores how authoritarian governments in these dystopian novels use language to legitimize authority, stifle dissent, and justify oppression in these novels. Leaving behind the classical literary and rhetorical methodology, the analysis uses an interdisciplinary approach combining pragmatics, argumentation theory, and critical discourse analysis with reference to the Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), the Cooperative Principle of pragmatics introduced by Grice (1975), the theory of politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987), and Pragma-Dialectics (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 200). The study reveals the common pragmatic techniques by critically examining critical instances of the argument, including strategic breaking of Gricean maxims, speech acts of coercion, euphemistic restatement and fallacious appeals to fear and authority. The results indicate that the two regimes are systemic in corrupting. Communicative norms in order to disrupt the truth, forget the history, and close the rational debate. Whereas Animal Farm is a perfect example of centralized, monologic propaganda, The Handmaid Tale can be regarded as a good illustration of a diffuse, hegemonic discourse, which takes the form of ritual and theology. The research findings conclude that pragmatic argumentation is not just a stylistic aspect, but it is a key mechanism of authoritarian authority. It presents the moral urgency of critical tongue consciousness and reaffirms the usefulness of dystopian fiction in analyzing the current political speech. The thesis is relevant to literary linguistics, argumentation studies and dystopian studies since it presents a replicable paradigm of analysis of how language, power, and ideology interact in fictional and real discourses.
