Dimension argumentative et narrative de l’information médiatique à travers des séquences bisegmentales

The present analysis is devoted to the discursive units that are activated at the moment by the media nomination as categoremes of the referent, Donald Trump, and shape the media narrative. These will be formulas, which appear in the headlines and imply labels, e.g. Donald Trump, agitateur en chef (‘Donald Trump, the troublemaker’; lemonde.fr, 5.10.2017). The research problem will be to determine their narrative and argumentative potential. Theoretical framework is provided by studies of the media information discourse (Arquembourg, 2011; Calabrese, 2009, 2013; Moirand, 2007; Veniard, 2013), as well as the argumentative discourse (Amossy, 2006). The corpus has been compiled on the basis of electronic version of two daily newspapers Le Monde (lemonde.fr) and Gazeta Wyborcza (wyborcza.pl), released between Jan the 1st 2016 and december 2020.

Superweed amaranth: metaphor and the power of a threatening discourse

This paper analyses the use of metaphor in discourses around the “superweed” Palmer amaranth. Most weed scientists associated with the US public agricultural extension system dismiss the term superweed. However, together with the media, they indirectly encourage aggressive control practices by actively diffusing the framing of herbicide resistant Palmer amaranth as an existential threat that should be eradicated at any cost. We use argumentative discourse analysis to better understand this process. We analyze a corpus consisting of reports, policy briefs, and press releases produced by state extension services, as well as articles from professional and popular magazines and newspapers quoting extension specialists and/or public sector weed scientists or agronomists. We show how the superweed discourse is powered by negative metaphors, and legitimizes aggressive steps to eradicate the weed. This discourse reinforces the farmers’ techno-optimism master frame, contributes to deskilling of farmers and sidelines ethical concerns.

Annotating argumentative structure in English-as-a-Foreign-Language learner essays

Argument mining (AM) aims to explain how individual argumentative discourse units (e.g. sentences or clauses) relate to each other and what roles they play in the overall argumentation. The automatic recognition of argumentative structure is attractive as it benefits various downstream tasks, such as text assessment, text generation, text improvement, and summarization. Existing studies focused on analyzing well-written texts provided by proficient authors. However, most English speakers in the world are non-native, and their texts are often poorly structured, particularly if they are still in the learning phase. Yet, there is no specific prior study on argumentative structure in non-native texts. In this article, we present the first corpus containing argumentative structure annotation for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) essays, together with a specially designed annotation scheme. The annotated corpus resulting from this work is called “ICNALE-AS” and contains 434 essays written by EFL learners from various Asian countries. The corpus presented here is particularly useful for the education domain. On the basis of the analysis of argumentation-related problems in EFL essays, educators can formulate ways to improve them so that they more closely resemble native-level productions. Our argument annotation scheme is demonstrably stable, achieving good inter-annotator agreement and near-perfect intra-annotator agreement. We also propose a set of novel document-level agreement metrics that are able to quantify structural agreement from various argumentation aspects, thus providing a more holistic analysis of the quality of the argumentative structure annotation. The metrics are evaluated in a crowd-sourced meta-evaluation experiment, achieving moderate to good correlation with human judgments.

Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments

Argumentative discourse rarely consists of opinions whose claims apply universally. As with logical statements, an argument applies to specific objects in the universe or relations among them, and may have exceptions. In this paper, we propose an argumentation formalism that allows associating arguments with a domain of application. Appropriate semantics are given, which formalise the notion of partial argument acceptance, i.e. the set of objects or relations that an argument can be applied to. We show that our proposal is in fact equivalent to the standard Argumentation Frameworks of Dung, but allows a more intuitive and compact expression of some core concepts of commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning, such as the scope of an argument, exceptions, relevance and others.

TOWARDS CHARACTERISTICS OF MEMORY-BASED RECONSTRUCTION OF THE REASONING DISCOURSE: A COGNITIVE STYLE PARAMETER

The article discusses functional features of the argumentative discourse and resulting characteristics of its post-perceptional reconstruction by respondents belonging to the cognitive style ‘field-dependence/field-independence’. The authors carried out a respondent-style identification experiment, based on the Embedded Figures Test methodology by the AKT-70 technique (U. Ettrich). The experiment classified the respondents into two distinct groups, field-dependent and field-independent. The groups were assigned to read and to listen to a text containing reasoning and, an hour later, to restore the initial reasoning. Then, the authors carried out their own (‘expert’) analysis of the initial text to see how the reasoning was organized and verbalized. Finally, the authors analyzed the characteristics of the resulting argumentative texts composed by the respondents. The article only discusses the results given by the field-independent respondents. The latter use almost all the Claims and Data of the original text, but the manifestation order of the functional elements differs. The respondents of this pole do not add their own arguments, they only use those given in the initial text. This study helps to identify linguo-argumentative profile of field-independent respondents. Also, resulting data extends the existing description of this pole in its linguistic aspect.

Discursive politics and policy (im)mobility: Metro-TOD policies in India

Large investments in metro systems, supported through a Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) regime, have become the preferred policy option to achieve sustainable and inclusive urban mobility in India. In this paper, we examine the particular practices and power relations through which metro-TOD policies have emerged and gained discursive dominance in India’s urban transport policies. We do so by bringing together urban policy mobilities (UPM) and argumentative discourse analysis (ADA) to conceptualize (im)mobility as the intense movement of specific discursive framings to the exclusion of others. Our analysis brings out the crucial role played by Urban Mobility India (UMI), an annual conference organized by the Indian federal government, in the (im)mobility of metro-TOD policies across Indian cities. We contribute to the growing literature on the power-laden nature of policy circulation in the Global South and address concerns regarding lack of analytical attention to marginalized policy pathways and immobile elements of mobile policies in UPM literature. We argue that policy mobility scholars can move beyond the analytical binaries of mobile/immobile policies by drawing upon the concepts of ADA which allow close examination of the discursive politics at play in policy related conferences. By studying the intra-national (im)mobility of metro-TOD policies in India, we expand the bounds of UPM literature towards a geography that has received limited attention thus far.