Abstract
This study addresses appearance verbs as argumentative indicators of defeasible reasoning in opinion articles, taking as a case study the Italian verb sembrare (‘seem’). Appearance verbs, due to their epistemic-modal and evidential-inferential features point to the presence of premises-conclusion relations. Moreover, their lexical semantics further constrain the types of inferences (argument schemes) which link premises to claims and can be more or less defeasible. The linguistic literature has investigated the relation between inferential evidentiality and epistemic modality, but it has devoted little attention to the links between the structure of the underlying inferences and degrees of defeasibility. Argumentation Theory has widely explored defeasible reasoning without making reference to the linguistic cues expressing the presence and the type of defeasibility at issue. Based on a multilevel analysis of sembrare’s occurrences in a corpus of opinion articles, this study (i) shows that appearance verbs work as indicators of defeasible reasoning, and (ii) provides a systematic methodology to trace back the roots of defeasibility in the inferential configuration of arguments. As a theoretical outcome, the analysis reveals that there are no argument schemes logically more defeasible than others. The roots of defeasibility can be traced back only if the whole inferential configuration, strictly tied to the context, is reconstructed.
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Notes
- 1.
As stated by the same Pollock (1987: 482), this philosophical definition of defeasible reasoning corresponds to that of non-monotonic reasoning developed in AI (artificial intelligence). In monotonic logic whatever is concluded before adding an information can still be concluded once the information is added. In other words, adding information does not cause the reduction of the set of propositions that can be derived. Otherwise, a reasoning is non-monotonic. Non-monotonic logic turned out to be especially relevant for artificial intelligence to represent the so-called ‘defaults’, rules that can be used provided that they are not invalidated by an exception.
- 2.
“A gap between what is the case and what is apparently the case” (our translation).
- 3.
As specified by Nuyts (2000: 40–41) his notion of performativity is well-distinguished from that proposed in speech act theory. Both definitions make reference to a phenomenon where something is executed at the moment of utterance. However there is a significant difference in what is performed: in m-performative constructions what is performed is not a verbal act, but a mental act of proposition evaluation.
- 4.
The corpus has been collected by team of the Swiss National Foundation project “From perception to inference. Evidential, argumentative and textual aspects of perception predicates in Italian” (grant n.141350, see http://www.perc-inferenza.ch) and directed by Johanna Miecznikowski and Andrea Rocci at USI (Università della Svizzera Italiana).
- 5.
“The speaker as such” (our translation).
- 6.
“The speaker as a world being” (our translation).
- 7.
The distinction ‘procedural versus material’ a reinterpretation of the types of conditions characterizing the opening stage in the Pragma-Dialectic critical discussion (Van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2002). In the AMT the binomial ‘procedural/material’ becomes relevant also for the analysis of the argumentation stage since it is applied to the study of argument schemes.
- 8.
The verb sembrare could not for instance appear in a typical case of analogical reasoning such as the following: “Ti ricordi quanto traffico c’era a Capodanno? E oggi è festa nazionale!? (Mi) Sembra che ci sarà molto traffico”, ‘Do you remember how much traffic was there for New Year’s Eve? And today is national holiday! It seems (to me) that there will be a lot of traffic’ (Musi 2017: 362).
- 9.
The sentence “Le gambe della sedia sembrerebbero essere bianche” (‘the legs of the chair would seem to be white’) could sound like a counterexample. However, in this case the verb does not have an inferential evidential function, but a reportative one signaled by the use of the conditional mode: the reported voice is that of the catalogue.
- 10.
According to the two scholars transferable properties are absolute: differently from relative properties, they are not determined through a comparison and are independent from the formal structure of the whole (e.g. colors).
- 11.
Raising constructions are constructions where an argument of a subordinate clause (i.e. the pronoun “he” in the sentence “It seems that he is right”) has raised to the matrix clause (i.e. “He seems to be right”).
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Musi, E. (2018). Tracing the Roots of Defeasible Reasoning Through Argumentative Indicators: A Study of the Italian Verb Sembra in Opinion Articles. In: Oswald, S., Herman, T., Jacquin, J. (eds) Argumentation and Language — Linguistic, Cognitive and Discursive Explorations. Argumentation Library, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73972-4_5
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