Implicit dialogical premises, explanation as argument: A corpus-based reconstruction

Abstract

This paper focuses on an explanation in a newspaper article: why new European Union citizens will come to the UK from Eastern Europe (e.g., because of available jobs). Using a corpus-based method of analysis, I show how regular target readers have been positioned to generate premises in dialogue with the explanation propositions, and thus into an understanding of the explanation as an argument, one which contains a biased conclusion not apparent in the text. Employing this method, and in particular 'corpus comparative statistical keywords', I show how two issues can be freshly looked at: implicit premise recovery; the argument/explanation disRésumé: J'emploie un logiciel qui analyse quantitativement un article (dont le but est d'expliquer pourquoi des citoyens de la nouvelle Europe vont quitter l'Europe de l'Est pour aller habiter au Royaume-Uni) de journal pour démontrer que son auditoire cible régulier est influencé à produire des prémisses dans un dialogue contenant des explications, et ainsi à interpréter des explications comme si elles étaient des arguments. Cette approche apporte une nouvelle optique sur l'identification des pré-misses implicites et sur la distinction entre des arguments et des explications.tinction.

A Computational Approach to Identifying Cultural Keywords Across Languages

“…Our approach connects with two distinct senses of “keyword” that are prominent in different parts of the literature. Cultural keywords (introduced already) are words with high cultural significance, and statistical keywords are words that stand out in a corpus because of high relative frequency or other statistical properties (Jeffries & Walker, 2012; O'Halloran, 2009; Stubbs, 2010). Some overlap between cultural and statistical keywords is expected, and we follow Jeffries and Walker (2012) in identifying cultural keywords by starting with a set of statistical keywords and filtering to retain only those of greatest cultural significance.…”