Modality and its Conversational Backgrounds in the Reconstruction of Argumentation

The paper considers the role of modality in the rational reconstruction of standpoints and arguments. The paper examines in what conditions modal markers can act as argumentative indicators and what kind of cues they provide for the reconstruction of argument. The paper critically re-examines Toulmin's hypothesis that the meaning of the modals can be analyzed in terms of a field-invariant argumentative force and field-dependent criteria in the light of the Theory of Relative Modality developed within linguistic semantics, showing how this theory can provide a more adequate model for exploiting the modals as indicators. The resulting picture confirms Toulmin's intuition only in part: on the one hand the modals are always relational in nature and dependent on a contextual conversational background of propositions; on the other hand only epistemic-doxastic modals directly express a speech-act level inferential relation between a set of premises and a standpoint. Other modalities express relations (e.g. causal or final relations) better seen as part of the content of the argument whose argumentative relevance depends on the argumentation scheme employed. Thus non-epistemic modals function as argumentative indicators only indirectl

Capturing editorial gatekeeping through the analysis of argumentation in editorial conference discussions

Il presente articolo analizza le riunioni di redazione come attività argomentative, attraverso le quali si realizza la funzione di gatekeeping entro le organizzazioni mediatiche. Particolare attenzione viene devoluta alle diverse norme che regolano le decisioni editoriali, e al rapporto tra queste norme e il dispiegarsi delle argomentazioni nelle discussioni. Ci si ricollega qui a una svolta nella ricerca sul gatekeeping: lo studio di Clayman & Reisner (1998) che considera le riunioni di redazione come luogo in cui il gatekeeping viene esercitato nell'interazione verbale. Questo approccio apre un campo di intervento promettente per l'applicazione della teoria dell'argomentazione allo studio delle norme e dei processi di decisione delle organizzazioni mediatiche. L'analisi mostra che emergono tre tipi distinti di discussione argomentativa entro l'activity type della riunione. Accanto a discussioni deliberative legate a singole decisioni editoriali, troviamo infatti discussioni concernenti la valutazione di decisioni passate e delle norme vigenti in redazione

Financial communication: Narrative and argument in the pursuit of sustainable trust – Introduction to the Thematic Section

In the emerging field of financial communication, interdisciplinary research based on the analysis of texts and discourse is gaining a prominent role. Bridging quantitative and qualitative approaches and covering financial disclosures, investor relations, business and financial media, as well as the communication of financial intermediaries and regulators, discourse-based studies of financial communication are becoming a unique interdisciplinary crossroads of research developed in accounting, applied linguistics, corporate communication, finance, rhetoric, sociology and natural language processing. This is the main goal of this Thematic Section published in Studies in Communication Sciences and following the second edition of the “Discourse Approaches to Financial Communication” (DAFC) conference held in Lugano in the summer 2017

Evidently epistential adverbs are argumentative indicators: A corpus-based study

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 scarcity of corpora argumentatively annotated and the absence of an empirically validated analytic methodology. Recent studies have shown that modals, that express that things might be otherwise, and evidentials, that point to the presence of information sources, are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators. On these grounds, we propose a systematic, non-language specific corpus-based procedure to identify indicators of argumentative discourse relations. We test the design of a multi-level annotation through the analysis of the English and Italian epistential adverbs evidently and evidentemente in comparable corpora of newspaper articles. We show that the annotation guidelines achieve consistent analytical results with expert annotators. Data analysis reveals that the two adverbs work as argumentative indicator both at the structural and at the inferential level: besides pointing to the presence of premises-conclusion relations, they recurrently pattern with causal argument schemes from the effect to the cause. The Italian adverb evidentemente is less polysemous and more frequent, thus working as a more reliable indicator

Journalists arguing newsmaking decisions on the basis of anticipated audience uptake: a study of argumentation in the newsroom

This thesis sets out to explore journalists’ anticipatory reasoning on audience uptake, i.e. on the ways in which the audience will react to news. In order to reach this goal, I conduct an argumentative analysis of various types of newsroom activities. The analysis sheds light on journalists’ reasoning processes concerning audience uptake that lead them to broadcast/publish one certain news item instead of another, or on the way they decide to broadcast/publish a news item, starting from their anticipatory inferences. The adopted corpus consists of data gained from two distinct datasets; a) data from a previous project, Ideè Suisse, consisting of TV-journalism data in Swiss German and French, and b) print-journalism data in Italian collected at the newsroom of Corriere del Ticino, the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland, in the framework of the project Argumentation in newsmaking process and product. The data consist of videotaped editorial conferences, informal and formal journalist discourses, frame interviews, retrospective interviews, news products and source materials. The contextual and argumentative analysis aims at investigating the distinct aspects involved in the anticipation of audience uptake and at investigating the places of reflection (i.e. editorial conferences, informal meetings and retrospective interviews) wherein certain kinds of standpoints are at stake and particular aspects of audience uptake are anticipated. The anticipated uptake includes 1) anticipation of an emotive effect, of a news 2) anticipation of a cognitive effect, and 3) anticipation of a persuasion. I sketched a typology of journalists’ anticipation of audience uptake in terms of illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary force. On the theoretical level I merge two theories that both aim at studying the human mind from a rational perspective. On the one hand, I use Castelfranchi’s theories on anticipation based on the cybernetic notion of goal, while, on the other hand, I use the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2011) for the study of the inferential configuration. I connect the fundamental notions of both theories as in a syllogism. Results have shown the noticeable prominence of anticipation of audience emotive uptake, where the object of journalists’ anticipation are the audience emotions. This type of anticipation can be intertwined with cognitive audience uptake anticipation and both types have proven to be subordinated to the anticipation of persuasion, since in the end journalists want to promote public understanding as well as capture audience attention. Results further show that many cases of anticipatory reasoning involved counterfactual reasoning. Counterfactual reasoning focussing on better unrealized scenarios has been found to occur mostly in evaluative editorial conferences. Whereas counterfactual reasoning focused on worse unrealized scenarios mostly occurs in retrospective interviews in which the journalist justifies the goodness of his editorial choices. Empirical evidence of the relationship between invalidation of expectation and counterfactual reasoning is also provided. Finally, I provide evidence of the argumentative foundations of counterfactual reasoning

Epistemic and Evidential Expressions as Context-Specific Argumentative Indicators in Institutional Dialogues: A Corpus Study of Interactions in the Financial Domain

This paper presents initial results from a corpus study aimed at exploring the argumentative function of evidential expressions in financial dialogues. We assume a macro-argumentative perspective to verify the hypothesis that evidentials correlate with argumentative moves, focusing on inferential and hearsay. We find both inferential and hearsay markers to be highly correlated with argumentative discourse units with hearsay evidentials occurring in premises and inferential ones occurring along the argumentative inferential chain