Comparing prefaced questions across activity types
journalists and financial analysts as argumentative questioners
Additional information
Authors
Lucchini C.,
Rocci A.,
Yaskorska-Shah O.
Type
Preprint
Year
2024
Language
English
Abstract
Prefaced questions, i.e., question utterances that are combined with assertive statements that provide background information concerning the questions themselves, are conventionalized discourse patterns that arise in both earnings conference calls (ECCs) and political press conferences (PPCs). As prefaces present “some sort of argumentation that legitimizes the question”, prefaced questions need to be analyzed as argumentative structures. ECCs and PPCs share the same interaction scheme but pertain to two different interaction fields, respectively finance and politics. In this work, we observe how the different characteristics of the two interaction fields affect the argumentative structure of prefaced questions, verifying the hypotheses that (1) financial analysts are more cooperative than journalists; and (2) journalists make more extensive use of reported speech in their arguments. We adopt a mixed-methods approach, combining corpus-based quantitative observations with an in-depth qualitative analysis of the argumentative structure of prefaced questions. To do so, we introduce a novel framework that combines Inference Anchoring Theory to represent the dialogical discourse structure with Argumentum Model of Topics to disentangle the enthymematic inferential structure.
Periodico
De l'argumentativité à l'argumentation
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
