The present paper examines how discursive representations and emotive constructions underpin an argumentative dynamic that emerges from apparently non-argumentative statements, like those found in newspaper headlines. Our data comes from Greek broadsheet newspapers in the polarized context of the Greek crisis. First, we outline an analytic synergy that scrutinizes representational meaning and the semiotization of emotions in headlines. We then move towards the reconstruction of the inferential passage, contained in the headlines, that unites the implicit standpoint with its supporting argument.

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 123-153.

This research aims at unraveling relationships between rhetorical devices from elocutio and argumentative topoi from inventio in advertising. Studies on this topic have attempted to demonstrate not only that rhetorical devices condense argumentation schemes, but also that they have a strong argumentative force. I will try to achieve my goal by applying the Argumentum Model of Topics to a corpus of award-winning advertisements.

This contribution aims at providing an argumentative method to account for epistemic modality and evidentiality. I claim that these two linguistic categories can work as semantic components of defeasible argumentative schemes based on classification processes. This kind of approximate reasoning is, in fact, frequently indicated by appearance verbs which signal that the inferred standpoint is conceived by the speaker as uncertain due to the deceiving nature of perceptual data. Drawing from an analysis at the semantic-argumentative interface, the way in which (...) prototype theory sheds light on the processes of meaning construction underlying defeasible arguments from definition is also shown. (shrink)

Metaphorical meaning can be analyzed as triggered by an apparent communicative breach, an incongruity that leads to a default of the presumptive interpretation of a vehicle. This breach can be solved through contextual renegotiations of meaning guided by the communicative intention, or rather the presumed purpose of the metaphorical utterance. This paper addresses the problem of analyzing the complex process of reasoning underlying the reconstruction of metaphorical meaning. This process will be described as a type of abductive argument, aimed at (...) explaining how the vehicle can best contribute to the purpose of the utterance. This type of reasoning involves the analysis of the possible predicates that can be and usually are attributed to the vehicle, and the selection of the one that can support the implicit conclusion constituting the communicative goal of the metaphorical utterance. Metaphorical meaning, in this perspective, becomes the outcome of a complex process of meaning reconstruction aimed at providing the best explanation of the function of the vehicle within a discourse move. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

The literature on argumentation and education often conveys that children’s argumentation skills are not well developed; therefore, it would be difficult to find argumentation in small children, as well as in primary school classrooms. However, studies focusing on argumentation in less formal contexts show that there is no need to depart from such a negative stance. If children are given room to pursue their lines of thought, they often produce sophisticated spontaneous argumentation. In this paper I consider arguments from definition (...) introduced by children as a case in point. To do so, I use a corpus of data, in which small children under the age of six years, discuss with an adult and with peers. Results show two uses of arguments from definition by children: on the one hand, children may introduce a new issue and their standpoint supported by an argument from definition; on the other hand, children may contest or refute an issue that was proposed by an adult and put forward an argument from definition. (shrink)

Objectivity is a key concept in journalism studies, yet a controversial one. Scholars disagree on what it precisely implies and on how strictly journalists should stick to it. I claim that adopting an argumentative perspective enables to see how journalists deal with objectivity in everyday work. In fact, the objectivity requirement plays the role of endoxical premise in argumentative reasoning that takes place during newsroom decision-making. In the present paper, this is shown by analyzing argumentative discussions in two television newsrooms (...) of the Swiss public service broadcaster. The case studies shed light on what objectivity means for these two newsrooms, as well as on how the goal of being objective intermingles with that of telling a story. Methodologically, argumentation is reconstructed employing Pragma-Dialectics, while endoxical premises and inferential patterns supporting standpoints are traced out applying the Argumentum Model of Topics. The examples are taken from a corpus collected during the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Idée suisse”. (shrink)

Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of arguments. However, a comprehensive lexicon of these linguistic devices is so far lacking due to the scarci...

This paper presents preliminary findings of the project [name omitted for anonymity]. This interdisciplinary project builds on Argumentation theory and developmental sociocultural psychology for the study of children’s argumentation. We reconstruct children’s inferences in adult-child and child-child dialogical interaction in conversation in different settings. We focus in particular on implicit premises using the Argumentum Model of Topics for the reconstruction of the inferential configuration of arguments. Our findings reveal that sources of misunderstandings are more often than not due to misalignments (...) of implicit premises between adults and children; these misalignments concern material premises rather than the inferential-procedural level. (shrink)

According to the argument scheme approach, to evaluate a given scheme-saturating instance completely does entail asking all critical questions relevant to it. Although this is a central task for argumentation theorists, the field currently lacks a method for providing a complete argument evaluation. Approaching this task at the meta-level, we combine a logical with a substantive approach to the argument schemes by starting from Toulmin’s schema: ‘data, warrant, so claim’. For the yet more general schema: ‘premise; if premise, then conclusion; (...) so conclusion’, we forward a meta-level CQ-list that is arguably both complete and applicable. This list should inform ongoing theoretical efforts at generating appropriate object-level CQs for specific argument schemes. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 1-17.

Compared to other domains of media discourse, economic-financial news contain a considerable amount of speech acts regarding future events, in particular predictions. This can be explained by their specific institutional context, financial markets, where investors constantly seek to single out gain opportunities and to correctly assess their risk. One of the crucial factors making economic-financial predictions worthy of being considered in investment decisions is argumentation, in particular the extent to which the predicted proposition follows from a plausible and acceptable reasoning. (...) Starting from a corpus of 50 articles of the Italian economic-financial press, we consider the inferential dimension of prediction-oriented arguments, focusing on the locus, i.e. the ontological relation on which the connection between the argument and the predictive conclusion rests. All predictions found in the corpus were manually annotated with the software UAM Corpus Tool. For each of them we identified the source, which could be either the journalist him/herself or a third party, typically financial analysts or corporate actors. We distinguished mere predictive opinions from predictive standpoints, i.e. predictions for which the journalist advances one or more supportive arguments. For the latter category, we identified the locus referring to an adaptation of the taxonomy outlined by Rigotti. The findings highlight in particular the following three interesting aspects: in predictions, journalists reinforce their stance by plausible justifications, but weaken it at the same time by marking it as uncertain and/or by using reported speech or evidential means to reduce their responsibility for the predictive speech act; the justification of a predictive standpoint, by the journalist or by third parties, is mostly based on loci of causality, in particular on the locus from efficient cause, the locus from final cause and complex forms of causality where the involvement of rational agents is implied but defocused; moreover, journalists refer to the predictive opinions of experts or corporate insiders to activate the locus from authority, either by explicit argumentation or implicitly, by reporting speech from reliable sources. Our study suggests that the role of predictions in financial news is not so much that of giving any straightforward advice to investors, but rather that of providing chunks of sound argumentative reasoning, including both supportive evidence and rebuttals or refutatory moves, that the investor-reader might apply and combine in the highly uncertain context of financial markets. Overall, our findings shed light on how financial journalists fulfil the function of information intermediaries in finance. (shrink)

The European Union is making increased efforts to find simpler and more effective ways to function adequately in the eyes of its citizens by using ‘soft law’ instruments such as recommendations. Although they have no legally binding force, recommendations have practical and legal effects occurring partly due to their normative content in which a course of action is prescribed and further supported by arguments intended to persuade the addressees of a political position. Although recommendations function as persuasive instruments due to (...) their argumentation, the characteristics of argumentation and how it is employed to convince the addressee to comply with certain measures have not been investigated at all. The main goal of the paper is to explain how arguments are used by the European Commission when recommending Member States to follow a new course of action. First, we will unravel the justificatory reasons employed by the Commission in order to make Member States comply with new measures and we will show how these reasons are combined into an argumentative pattern : 1–23, 2016; J Argum Context 6: 3–26, 2017). This pattern basically prescribes a course of action to Member States, which is further supported by arguments in which the necessity and advantages of following the proposed course of action are justified. Second, we will explain how and why the way in which the arguments are combined in this complex pattern could be potentially persuasive for the Member States despite the legally non-binding character of recommendations. We will show that the European Commission tries to persuade the Member States to take new measures by evading the burden of proof imposed by the legislative framework. At a more specific level of analysis, we will delve into the implicit premises in the argumentation, which enable us to identify cases of evasion of the burden of proof due to the Commission’s use of implicit starting points which might not be accepted by the Member States. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 155-172.

Argumentation is generally conceived of as a dialogic activity between two or more participants. Nonetheless, it operates also at an intrapersonal level, in a soliloquy where protagonist and antagonist of the critical discussion are embodied in the same person. We argue this case by analyzing journalists’ argumentation about linguistic choices in newswriting processes. Empirically, we draw on data generated with progression analysis, in particular with cue-based retrospective verbal protocols. The data was produced by the journalists under investigation when they, while (...) watching video recordings of their text production processes, reconstructed and verbalized their decisions. In the detail analysis, we focus on one editorial by an experienced journalist of Corriere del Ticino, the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland. (shrink)

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are (...) generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices. (shrink)

In their extensive overview of various concepts of presumption Godden and Walton recognise “the heterogeneous picture of presumptions that exists in argumentation theory today”. I argue that this heterogeneity results from an epiphenomenal character of the notion of presumption. To this end, I first distinguish between three main classes of presumptions. Framework presumptions define the basic conditions of linguistic understanding and meaningful conversation. The “presumption of veracity” is their paradigm case. I argue that such presumptions are satisfactorily covered by the (...) Principle of Charity, or else Gricean maxims or satisfaction conditions for speech acts. Formal presumptions are general presumptive rules of argument, theorised as topoi or acceptable inference warrants, including institutional warrants. Material presumptions are acceptable outcomes of nested or outsourced arguments, which entitles arguers to use them as acceptable premises or opinions in further arguments without the typical burden of proof. If this is correct, then the study of presumption always collapses into the study of other, likely more fundamental, concepts. Does it render presumptions, by Occam’s Razor, altogether redundant in argumentation theory? I tentatively answer this question from a consistently conversational perspective on argumentation; I argue that the pragmatic grounds for presumptions are to be found in the conditions for speech act performance in the institutional social world, as developed by Searle. (shrink)

ABSTRACTModern executive politics is characterised by blame games – offensive and defensive symbolic performances by various individual or collective social actors. In this article, I propose a discursive approach to analysing opposition–government blame games where top politicians try to persuade mass audiences to side with them in disputes over government's culpability by using carefully crafted written texts. Drawing insights and concepts from the tradition of discourse-historical studies into political communication as well as the recent literature on blame avoidance in government, (...) I analyse conflicting opinion pieces published by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the UK in the wake of the global financial crisis that developed since 2007. I present a basic functional argument model of attributing and avoiding blame, reconstruct the competing argumentation schemes that help us interpret public debates over the crisis, and show how blame is attached or deflected using various persuasive discursive devices, such as metaphors, lexical cohesion, and ways of framing and positioning, that underlie particular attacks, justifications, or excuses. In conclusion, I emphasise the importance of looking beyond the formal structure of the arguments to identify the more subtle emotional appeals used in government-related blame games. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is the acknowledgement that individual reasoning, understood as inner dialogue, and social argumentation, albeit they are two different phenomena, share some similarities. On this basis, this paper sets out to apply instruments from argumentation theory to inner dialogue in order to better explain it. Within this framework, some limitations to the study of inner dialogue are also discussed; and methodological suggestions are provided in order to grasp what could be considered data on “inner dialogue” (...) starting from social research interviews. The ultimate aim is to go beyond a mere recognition of a similarity between inner dialogue and argumentation and start analysing inner dialogue empirically using tools from argumentation theory. The findings show that the analytic overview help shed light on how inner dialogue within processes of individual decision-making develops and what it means to have an internal difference of opinion, in which one and the same person adopts opposing standpoints and argues for them. On the opposite, it is shown that the notion of strategic manoeuvring per se cannot be applied to inner dialogue. (shrink)

A persuasion dialogue is a dialogue in which a conflict between agents with respect to their points of view arises at the beginning of the talk and the agents have the shared, global goal of resolving the conflict and at least one agent has the persuasive aim to convince the other party to accept an opposing point of view. I argue that the persuasive force of argument may have not only extreme values but also intermediate strength. That is, I wish (...) to introduce two additional types of the effects of persuasion in addition to successful and unsuccessful ones (cf. Van Eemeren and Houtlosser in Argumentation 14(3):293–305, 2000; Advances in pragma-dialectics. Sic Sat, Amsterdam, 2002; Walton in A pragmatic theory of fallacy. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1995; Walton and Krabbe in Commitment in dialogue: basic concepts of interpersonal reasoning. State University of New York Press, Albany, New York, 1995). I propose a model which provides for modified versions of the standpoint of an agent needed in order to bring about two possible outcomes of a persuasion dialogue. These two outcomes I label partially-successful and over-successful. I call the potential, not yet verbalised, standpoint of an agent here the original topic t. Based on some aspects of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson in Relevance: communication and cognition. Blackwell, Oxford, 1986; Wilson and Sperber in The handbook of pragmatics. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 2006), I explain that the modified version of the original topic t is an implicature created from the original topic t and from a specific mental topic which belongs to, what I call the beneficial cognitive model (hence BCM). I define BCMi,t as a set of topics which are within the area of agent i’s interest of persuasion with respect to t. (shrink)

This paper studies emotional inferencing triggered by emotion terms using Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The corpus, in French, is an excerpt of a video-recorded testimony in which a middle school teacher evokes her experience of being in class the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, thus presenting a case of argumentation in context. The analysis focuses on the argumentative structure and on the rhetorical strategies that trigger emotional inferencing. The emotional inferencing derives from a Locus of Ontological (...) Implication, which links a situation and an emotion, while the culture-bound elements tend to be part of the endoxon. (shrink)