Location

University of Windsor

Document Type

Paper

Keywords

lexical evidentials, argumentative indicators, (inter)subjectivity, opinion articles, oil drilling, multilevel annotation scheme

Start Date

18-5-2016 9:00 AM

End Date

21-5-2016 5:00 PM

Abstract

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus (30 texts) about oil drilling issues in the Adriatic Sea. Lexical evidentials (e.g. see, must, find, evidently) indicate “the kind of justification for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim […]” (Anderson 1986: 274). They constitute a privileged viewpoint to investigate how and at which degree journalists manage to present their claims as objective since they work as argumentative indicators (Van Eemeren et al. 2007), pointing to inherently subjective (e.g. I find that x) or possibly objective (e.g. It must be that x) standpoints and to basic (e.g. see) or assailable (e.g. apparently) premises (Rocci 2013, Musi 2014) depending on their lexical semantics. On these grounds, I will retrieve all the attested evidentials and annotate them at different levels including the types of standpoints and the type of premises they introduce (Freeman 2000, 2005). Once finished the annotation, I will compare the results of the analysis at different levels and I will try to undertstand which features make evidentials privileged strategies of subjectification or objectification.

References

Eemeren, F. H. van, Houtlosser, P. and Snoeck Henkemans, F. (2007). Argumentative indicators in

Discourse. A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Amsterdam: Springer.

Freeman, J. (2000). What Types of Statements are There? Argumentation 14(2): 135-157.

Freeman, J. (2005). Acceptable Premises: An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rocci, A. (2013). Modal conversational backgrounds and evidential bases in predictions: the view from the Italian modals. In K. Jaszczolt and L. de Saussure (Eds.), Time: Language, Cognition and Reality (pp. 128-156). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Musi, E. (2014). Evidential modals at the semantic-argumentative interface: appearance verbs as indicators of defeasible argumentation. Informal Logic 34 (3): 417-442.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share

COinS
 
May 18th, 9:00 AM May 21st, 5:00 PM

Strategies of objectification in opinion articles: the case of evidentials

University of Windsor

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus (30 texts) about oil drilling issues in the Adriatic Sea. Lexical evidentials (e.g. see, must, find, evidently) indicate “the kind of justification for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim […]” (Anderson 1986: 274). They constitute a privileged viewpoint to investigate how and at which degree journalists manage to present their claims as objective since they work as argumentative indicators (Van Eemeren et al. 2007), pointing to inherently subjective (e.g. I find that x) or possibly objective (e.g. It must be that x) standpoints and to basic (e.g. see) or assailable (e.g. apparently) premises (Rocci 2013, Musi 2014) depending on their lexical semantics. On these grounds, I will retrieve all the attested evidentials and annotate them at different levels including the types of standpoints and the type of premises they introduce (Freeman 2000, 2005). Once finished the annotation, I will compare the results of the analysis at different levels and I will try to undertstand which features make evidentials privileged strategies of subjectification or objectification.

References

Eemeren, F. H. van, Houtlosser, P. and Snoeck Henkemans, F. (2007). Argumentative indicators in

Discourse. A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Amsterdam: Springer.

Freeman, J. (2000). What Types of Statements are There? Argumentation 14(2): 135-157.

Freeman, J. (2005). Acceptable Premises: An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rocci, A. (2013). Modal conversational backgrounds and evidential bases in predictions: the view from the Italian modals. In K. Jaszczolt and L. de Saussure (Eds.), Time: Language, Cognition and Reality (pp. 128-156). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Musi, E. (2014). Evidential modals at the semantic-argumentative interface: appearance verbs as indicators of defeasible argumentation. Informal Logic 34 (3): 417-442.