Emotions in Argumentative Narration

Abstract

This paper studies emotional inferencing triggered by emotion terms using Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The corpus, in French, is an excerpt of a video-recorded testimony in which a middle school teacher evokes her experience of being in class the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, thus presenting a case of argumentation in context. The analysis focuses on the argumentative structure and on the rhetorical strategies that trigger emotional inferencing. The emotional inferencing derives from a Locus of Ontological Implication, which links a situation and an emotion (and vice-versa), while the culture-bound elements tend to be part of the endoxon.

Pathos in Natural Language Argumentation: Emotional Appeals and Reactions

“…Several researchers tackled the problem of emotions in argumentation from the empirical perspective, employing methods from both discourse analysis and psychological as well as physiological tools. Discourse analysis studies focus on emotion names occurring in natural language, referring to them as "said" emotions (Plantin 2019;Cigada 2019;Greco et al 2022) in the context of persuasive dialogue. Certain authors add that emotions can be not only "said", but also "shown" or "argued" (Micheli 2010), that is they are expressed not only by direct emotion names but also other linguistic devices.…”