Abstract
In this paper, I explore the potential of systematically studying the linguistic surface of discourse for the purposes of identifying markers of argumentative moves and other related categories, such as types of arguments and argumentative strategies. Such a list of argumentative markers can prove useful for the (semi)automatic treatment of a large corpus of texts. After reviewing literature on the linguistic realization of argumentative moves as well as literature on the subject of discourse markers, it becomes clear that the search for representative items of argumentative markers cannot be restricted to those elements marking relations but that it should also include elements that signal a certain function that is of pertinence to argumentative analysis. In this view, argumentative markers can be any single or complex lexical expression as well as a discursive configuration whose presence in a given utterance marks that utterance or the one preceding/following it, or a larger piece of discourse as having a certain argumentative function (as an argumentative move, a type of argument or an argumentative strategy). Examples taken from a French corpus on the controversy surrounding the development and applications of nanotechnology currently under study are used to illustrate the different types of argumentative markers proposed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Outside the field of argumentation studies, connectives and/or discourse markers have been studied in detail from a variety of theoretical approaches and with varying theoretical and practical interests. For an overview, see the volume edited by Fischer (2006b). The three approaches presented here fall within the field of argumentation studies and share an interest in providing a more general theoretical frame, within which the study of independent linguistic elements can be subsumed, something which I consider a necessary step before studying each element separately.
A sub-group in this class are the so-called “meta-discursive markers”, which include expressions that are used to signal to the interlocutor the illocutionary function of the utterance that follows (or precedes) them, such as “I have a question to ask”, “Let me tell you something”, “this is not a critique”, “I was just asking”.
See, for example, the many indicators in interrogative form that the authors identify, such as “what do you mean exactly?”, “isn’t it true that..?”, “do you agree that..?”, etc.
For instance, one can think of indicators of dissociation that van Rees discusses in her book (van Rees 2009, Chapter 3).
Taboada (2006), working within the Rhetorical Structure Theory, concludes after examination of the rhetorical relations in two corpora that it is not always the case that these rhetorical relations are indeed marked, and that signalling, when present, is never sufficient to identify one particular relation either.
The three partners of the project are the Groupe de Sociologie Pragmatique et Réflexive (GSPR) of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the Laboratoire Sport et Culture of the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, and the Laboratoire Communication et Politique (LCP) of the CNRS.
Foresight Institute (http://www.foresight.org/), the first organisation founded in 1989 with the aim to educate society about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology, describes it as follows: “Nanotechnology is a group of emerging technologies in which the structure of matter is controlled at the nanometer scale, the scale of small numbers of atoms, to produce novel materials and devices that have useful and unique properties. Some of these technologies impose only limited control of structure at the nanometer scale, but they are already in use, producing useful products. They are also being further developed to produce even more sophisticated products in which the structure of matter is more precisely controlled”.
For a presentation in English of the pragmatic and reflexive approach to sociology within which public controversies are studied, see Chateauraynaud (2009).
See the paper on “désormais [from now on]” by Chateauraynaud and Doury (2011).
It should be emphasized that Prospéro is not a software developed by linguists that seeks to provide an accurate description of a certain linguistic phenomenon based on a corpus search but a software developed by sociologists who are interested in describing social phenomena, such as controversies in the fields of science and technology, by paying close attention to the linguistic properties of the discourse that social actors produce. As a result, the texts treated with this software are not linguistically tagged.
Non-lexicalised items such as prosodic features as well as gestures could eventually be considered as argumentative markers. However, given the lack of detailed studies in this area and the difficulty of coding such features for a software-aided analysis, I am not considering them here. Similarly, grammatical aspects such as tense, mood or number may also be considered as candidates for argumentative markers, but they cannot be coded separately from their phonological realisation, something which renders their use as markers impossible, given the technical characteristics of the particular software at hand.
The examples are taken from a part of the corpus that consists of the leaflets that various groups engaged in the public deliberation on the issue of the development of nanotechnology in France have published between 2009 and 2010. The abbreviations in parenthesis refer to the names of these groups. The translation in English is the author’s.
The case of such “global argumentative markers” is similar to what the authors of the Geneva School refer to as “meta-discursive markers” (see note above) and to what Fraser (1996) labels as “parallel markers”.
It is worth noting that Fischer (2006a, p. 7) observes that even in the literature on discourse markers and particles (which tend to be defined as elements marking relationships and discourse structure) there is reluctance by certain scholars to accept that it is relationships that these elements create or mark. These authors remind that stance marking or hesitation markers and interjections, which may function as discourse markers, do not necessarily involve relationships between units.
An utterance such as “And that is what I think about it” can be used to mark the discourse that precedes it as being the speaker’s standpoint.
Plantin (2002, to appear) makes a similar point when he stresses the fact that no connector in French can be considered as having only an argumentative function.
It is worth noting that van Eemeren et al. (2007) indeed consider such linguistic elements, in particular when presenting indicators of argument schemes (Chapter 6).
The expression “est montré par de multiples exemples” in example (5) above or an expression such as “et ceci pour plusieurs raisons” can serve as markers of advancing an argument, just as the connectives “car” and “puisque” do.
The expressions “tout le monde convient qu(e)” and “comme chacun sait” in examples (3) and (4) respectively can be quite an unambiguous marker for the common ground that the speaker takes to be shared.
It remains to be verified by an empirical study on a corpus of texts whether the theoretical difference between an “appeal to authority” and an “argumentum ad verecundiam” can also be marked at the level of the linguistic realization of these arguments.
The latter is the case with such lexical expressions as “assurément” and “paradoxalement” in examples (1) and (2) respectively, where their presence does not help to identify the argumentative move as being the advancement of a standpoint, but helps to reinforce the standpoint advanced in the first case, and to contextualize it with respect to what is taken to be the case up to that moment in the second example. For a study of the strategic function of English stance adverbs used to qualify a standpoint see Tseronis (2009).
In example (6) above, the discursive configuration “Il est compréhensible … Néanmoins” can be an unambiguous marker for the deployment of a concessive strategy.
References
Angermüller, J. 2005. “Qualitative” methods of social research in France: Reconstructing the actor, deconstructing the subject. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6, Art. 19, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0503194.
Anscombre, J.-C., and O. Ducrot. 1983. L’argumentation dans la langue. Bruxelles: Mardaga.
Charaudeau, P. 1992. Grammaire du sens et de l’expression. Paris: Hachette.
Charolles, M., and M.-P. Pery-Woodley. 2005. Les adverbiaux cadratifs: Introduction. Langue Française 148: 3–8.
Chateauraynaud, F. 2003. Prospéro: Une technologie littéraire pour les sciences humaines. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Chateauraynaud, F. 2009. Public controversies and the pragmatics of protest. Toward a ballistics of collective action. Paris: EHESS, Manuscript available online at http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/37/36/86/PDF/Public_controversies_and_the_Pragmatics_of_Protest.pdf.
Chateauraynaud, F., and M. Doury. 2011. The collective making of temporal aspects in public debates. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on argumentation, ed. F.H. van Eemeren, B. Garssen, D. Godden, and D. Mitchell. Amsterdam: SicSat. CD-Rom.
Doury, M. 2004. La classification des arguments dans les discours ordinaires. Langages 154: 59–73.
Doury, M. 2005. The accusation of amalgame as a meta-argumentative refutation. In Argumentation in practice, ed. F.H. van Eemeren, and P. Houtlosser, 145–161. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers.
Doury, M. 2009. Argument schemes typologies in practice: The case of comparative arguments. In Pondering on problems of argumentation: Twenty essays on theoretical issues, ed. F.H. van Eemeren, and B. Garssen, 141–156. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ducrot, O. 1983. Opérateurs argumentatifs et visée argumentative. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 5: 7–36.
Ducrot, O. 1995. Les modificateurs déréalisants. Journal of Pragmatics 24: 145–165.
Ducrot, O., et al. 1980. Les mots du discours. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Eemeren, F.H., and R. van Grootendorst. 1992. Argumentation communication, and fallacies. A pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
van Eemeren, F.H., and R. Grootendorst. 2004. A systematic theory of argumentation. The pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Eemeren, F.H., P. Houtlosser, and A.F. Snoeck Henkemans. 2007. Argumentative indicators in discourse. A pragma-dialectical study. Dordrecht: Springer.
Fischer, K. 2006a. Towards an understanding of the spectrum of approaches to discourse particles: Introduction to the volume. In Approaches to discourse particles, ed. K. Fisher, 1–20. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Fischer, K. (ed.). 2006b. Approaches to discourse particles. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Fraser, B. 1990. An approach to discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 383–395.
Fraser, B. 1996. Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics 6: 167–190.
Fraser, B. 1999. What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 31: 931–952.
Fraser, B. 2006. Towards a theory of discourse markers. In Approaches to discourse particles, ed. K. Fisher, 189–204. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Kienpointner, M. 2010. Review of: Frans H van Eemeren, Peter Houtlosser, A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans: Argumentative indicators in discourse. A pragma-dialectical study. Argumentation 24: 519–524.
Marcu, M. 1997. The rhetorical parsing of natural language texts. In The Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (ACL’97/EACL’97), 96–103. Madrid, Spain, July 7–10.
Moeschler, J. 1989. Pragmatic connectives, argumentative coherence and relevance. Argumentation 3: 321–339.
Paillard, D. 2010. Marqueurs discursifs et scène énonciative. In Connecteurs discursifs, ed. S. Hancil, 13–39. Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen.
Pêcheux, M. 1969. Analyse automatique du discours. Paris: Dunod.
Plantin, Ch. 2002. Argumentation studies and discourse analysis: The French situation and global perspectives. Discourse Studies 4: 343–368.
Plantin, Ch. to appear. Les instruments de structuration des séquences argumentatives. Verbum, numéro spécial: “L'inscription langagière de l'argumentation”.
Reed, Ch., and F. Grasso. 2007. Recent advances in computational models of natural argument. International Journal of Intelligent Systems 22: 1–15.
van Rees, M.A. 2009. Dissociation in argumentative discussions A pragma-dialectical perspective. Dordrecht: Springer.
Rossari, C. 2000. Connecteurs et relations de discours: des liens entre cognition et connectives. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy.
Roulet, E. 1984. Speech acts, discourse structure, and pragmatic connectives. Journal of Pragmatics 8: 31–47.
Roulet, E., A. Auchlin, J. Moeschler, C. Rubattel, and M. Schelling. 1985. L’articulation du discours en français contemporain. Bern: Peter Lang.
Taboada, M. 2006. Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 567–592.
Tseronis, A. 2009. Qualifying standpoints. Stance adverbs as a presentational device for managing the burden of proof. Utrecht: LOT Dissertation Series.
Acknowledgments
The article is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at the 7th ISSA Conference in Amsterdam. It originates in the work that is being carried out within the framework of an interdisciplinary project called: “Chimères nano biotechnologiques et post-humanité: sociologie des controverses sur les mutations du genre humain annoncées par les nanosciences”, funded by the National Research Agency (ANR) of France. I would like to thank Marianne Doury and Francis Chateauraynaud for their comments and suggestions as well as for the lively research group within which the ideas presented in this article have grown.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tseronis, A. From Connectives to Argumentative Markers: A Quest for Markers of Argumentative Moves and of Related Aspects of Argumentative Discourse. Argumentation 25, 427–447 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9215-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9215-x