Analyzing the structure of argumentative discourse

Abstract

Consider a discourse situation where the speaker tries to convince the hearer of a particular point of view. The first task for the hearer is to understand what it is the speaker wants him to believe--to analyze the structure of the argument being presented, before judging credibility and eventually responding.This paper describes a model for the analysis of arguments that includes:• a theory of expected coherent structure which is used to limit analysis to the reconstruction of particular transmission forms;• a theory of linguistic clues which assigns a functional interpretation to special words and phrases used by the speaker to indicate the structure of the argument;• a theory of evidence relationships which includes the demand for pragmatic analysis to accommodate beliefs not currently held.The implications of this particular design for dialogue analysis in general are thus:• structure is an important feature to extract in a representation to control the processing;• linguistic constructions can be assigned useful interpretations;• pragmatic analysis is crucial in cases where the participants differ in beliefs.

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