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I consider some uses of citations in academic writing and analyze them as instances of the "appeal to expert opinion" argumentative scheme to show that the critical questions commonly linked to this scheme are difficult to apply. I argue that, by considering citations as special communicative and argumentative situated acts, their use in real practice can be explained more adequately. Adaptation to the audience and to the social constraints is common and necessary in order to collaborate with others and to advance in a discipline, but also to attain rhetorical goals that differ from strictly cognitive ones. Résumé

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The main goal of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we will present two of the most important contemporary semantic theories far discourse processing: Situation Semantics or SS (Barwise and Perry (1993)) and Discourse Representation Theory or DRT (Kamp (1981)). Both are formal theories, and therefore, they meet a necessary-though not sufficient-requirement far their eventual irnplementation. On the other hand, we will study a classical issue in the theory of language, namely, natural language negation. We will consider its treatment in these semantic theories, trying to show why negation has always resisted to a satisfactory treatment., and remains as an unsolved problem from Aristotle to contemporary philosophy, syntax, semantics and pragmatics (Hom (1989)). Then, we will malce a (modest) proposal that will be showed to solve sorne of the problems of SS and DRT far treating negation. Our proposal consists in linking negation with a theory of informational partition in the frame of an enriched version of DRT called Segmented DRT (Asher (1993)). Este trabajo tiene dos objetivos principales. Por una parte, pretendemos presentar dos de las teorías semánticas actuales más importantes en procesamiento del discurso: la semántica de situaciones (SS) y la teoría de representación del discurso (DRT). Se trata de dos semánticas formales, requisito indispensable, aunque no suficiente, para una eventual implementación. Por otra parte, abordaremos un problema clásico en teoría del lenguaje: la negación. Consideraremos su tratamiento en cada una de estas teorías y mostraremos algunos de los motivos por los que la negación se ha resistido a un tratamiento satisfactorio y ha permanecido como problema no resuelto desde Aristóteles hasta la filosofía, sintaxis, semántica y pragmática actuales. A continuación, realizaremos una propuesta (modesta) que permite superar algunas de las limitaciones de estas teorías para tratar la negación, que consiste en vincularla con el fenómeno de la partición informacional (tema/foco) en el marco de una extensión de DRT, DRT con segmentos o SDRT.