Argumentation theory, or “new rhetoric”, focuses on our uses of language when a decision with an action in sight is at stake. Today, argumentation theory has proven particularly pertinent to the analysis of the role language plays in clinical practice and more generally in biomedicine – areas that increasingly involve individual choices regarding health and the body.

Depending on whatkind of thing“language” is intended to be, different artistic–communicative codes can be considered as languages. For example, music is arguably a communicative code with a syntax – though by no means a universal syntax – but without a semantics. Or, perhaps,music has a peculiar semantics connected to the affective domain.Yet, what about dance? Dance and music share dynamicity, what Daniel Stern takes to be the fundamental aspect for communicating “forms of vitality”. Does this imply that dance hasa syntax, or a semantics, too?

Not less interesting are reflections concerning the “languages” of pictorial arts, both figurative and abstract.