Argumentative meanings and their stylistic configurations in clinical research publications

Abstract

The paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the topical organisation and stylistic features of argumentation in a corpus of ophthalmic clinical research papers. The study responds to the need for systematised and generalisable argumentation models in knowledge-intensive fields. We present here a schematised superstructure of the arguments from the corpus, charting the configurations of stylistic features, which signal the elements of this superstructure, epistemic topoi. We pay special attention to the role of lexical categories (or semantic fields) in the configurations, to the relations between the fields, and to their interactions with other elements of the configurations, including semantic, grammatical, syntagmatic, deictic, and coreferential features. Epistemic topoi are a promising discourse constituent in argumentation because, as we found, they are distinct from syntagmatic units, such as phrases, clauses, or argumentative zones, and because they are signalled with substantially distinctive stylistic features despite having no fixed order in the superstructure. They hold considerable promise for computational argumentation analysis and processing, perhaps especially in scientific and technical discourses, where the need for reliable detection and summarisation is particularly high. Our investigation shows that despite the complex and interpenetrating semantic and stylistic attributes of argumentation, there are significant, computationally tractable regularities.

Keywords:

• argument domain
• argumentative superstructure
• clinical research
• epistemic topoi
• lexical (semantic) fields
• linguistic features
• metadiscourse
• stylistic configurations

Acknowledgements

This publication was made possible with financial support from the University of Waterloo. The authors gratefully acknowledge John Swales’ and Olga Vechtomova’s feedback to the research materials on which this paper is based. We are also wish to thank Argument and Computation’s anonymous reviewers’ rich and helpful commentary on earlier versions of the paper. We are especially grateful for their insights into the current state of argumentation analysis and mining.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

This publication was made possible with financial support from the University of Waterloo.

Notes

1 Also refer to the websites of the Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA) workshops (http://www.cmna.info/) and the Computational Models of Argument (COMMA) conference (http://www.comma-conf.org/) for recent developments in computational modelling of argumentation.

2 See Aristotle's Rhetoric (1924), especially 1358^a. There are many debates concerning topoi and many interpretations of Aristotle's text, which we will not enter. We are content with the classical insight, aligned with the term topoi, that (1) ways of arguing have structural signatures and (2) some of those ways of arguing are ‘universal’ while others are local to particular argument fields.

3 The term syntagm means units of linear organization in text and discourse, such as words, phrases, sentences, or text sections (De Beaugrande, 1997, p. 354).

4 IMRD stands for a now popular format of empirical publications, which includes four main sections: introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

5 We believe visual annotation to be a very important tool for text analysis, but do not have sufficient room and scope to include details about this method here. We will publish a justification and illustration of visual annotation elsewhere. In the meantime, Gladkova's dissertation is the best source (2010, pp. 88–93).

6 In all examples the emphasis is ours.

7 To go along with study design, other composite topoi that we identified in our corpus are general relevance, state of the art, present series, research procedures, composite data, composite findings, composite commentary, and disparity/ similarity analysis.

8 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘preliminary activities’ and Liddy’s (1991) ‘subjects’.

9 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘schedule of testing method’, ‘place where testing was carried out’, ‘time of testing’, and ‘specification of procedures employed in testing’, and Salager-Meyer’s (1994) ‘describe the process which led to the obtaining of the data’.

10 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘specification of objects used in testing’.

11 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘specification of equipment used’, ‘source of objects’, and ‘source of equipment’.

12 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘model used’ and ‘data reductions, calculations’.

13 Cf. Aristotle's ‘definition’ (Huseman, 1994), Trawiński’s (1989) ‘evaluation criteria used’, Liddy’s (1991) ‘new terms defined’, and Swales’s (2004) ‘definitional clarifications’.

14 Cf. Salager-Meyer’s (1994) ‘justify the reason for the investigation’ and Swales’s (2004) ‘indicating a gap’.

15 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘idea of testing method’, Liddy’s (1991) ‘research questions’ and ‘research topic’, Myers’s (1992) ‘self-referential introductory statements’, and Swales’s (2004) ‘announcing present research descriptively and/or purposively’.

16 Cf. Liddy’s (1991) ‘hypothesis’ and Swales’s (2004) ‘presenting research questions or hypotheses’.

17 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘possible ways of improving solution’, Liddy’s (1991) ‘practical applications’ and Salager-Meyer’s (1994) ‘make suggestions’.

18 In all examples parenthetical citations are represented with ellipses.

19 Cf. Aristotle's ‘existing decisions’ (Huseman, 1994) and Liddy’s (1991) ‘relation to other research’.

20 Cf. Aristotle's ‘proportional results’ and ‘identical results’ (Huseman, 1994), Trawiński’s (1989) ‘comparison with results obtained by other authors’, and Thompson’s (1993) ‘statements citing external consistency’.

21 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘evaluation of data completeness’ and ‘analysis of possible errors’ and Thompson’s (1993) ‘evaluative comments on the quality of experimental data’.

22 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘evaluation of data precision’ and Liddy’s (1991) ‘reliability’.

23 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘explanation of results obtained’.

24 Cf. Harmsze and Kircz’s (1998) ‘findings’ and Swales’s (2004) ‘announcing principal outcomes’.

25 Cf. Liddy’s (1991) ‘future research needs’ and Salager-Meyer’s (1994) ‘propose further questions’, as well as Trawiński’s (1989) ‘new problems encountered during research’, Thompson’s (1993) ‘calls for further research in the results section’, and Harmsze and Kircz’s (1998) ‘new problems’.

26 Cf. Aristotle's ‘the expediency or the harmfulness’ (Rhetoric, I.3.1358b), Trawiński’s (1989) ‘possible usage areas in practice’ and ‘possible usage areas in science’, Salager-Meyer’s (1994) ‘motivate the study’, and Swales’s (2004) ‘stating the value of the present research’.

27 Cf. Trawiński’s (1989) ‘characteristics’ content elements.

28 Cf. Salager-Meyer’s (1994) ‘describe the process of manipulating the data obtained during the experimental stage’.

29 Cf. Aristotle's ‘incentives and deterrents’ (Huseman, 1994), Trawiński’s (1989) ‘justification’ content elements, and Thompson’s (1993) ‘justifications for methodological selections’.

30 While our work here is not concerned with figures of speech, but it is entirely consonant with that approach. Fahnestock (1999, 23–24, et passim) argues convincingly that figures of speech epitomize topoi; conversely, topoi are elaborations of the argumentative structures that figures can crystallise. The computational detection and plotting of figures is a fine-grained approach that reveals much (Harris & DiMarco, 2009; Gawryjolek, DiMarco, & Harris 2009), especially in stylistically rich argument discourses like political speeches and opinion pieces. But it also misses larger units of argument structure, particularly in the texts of authors not given to crystalline phrasing. The computational detection and plotting of topoi would operate at a mid-grained level, and should prove especially profitable for scientific and technical argumentation.

31 Based on our review of past CMNA workshops, COMMA conferences, and the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining, held at the 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics Conference.

32 Unlike BASIC TOPOI, which are monads indivisible into other recurrent topoi in our corpus, COMPOSITE TOPOI incorporate the BASIC ones. In this paper, we do not expand on COMPOSITE TOPOI. For a fuller delineation of the superstructure, with definitions and examples, see Gladkova (2010).