Andrea Rocci

Andrea Rocci is a full professor of language sciences and deputy director of the Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics, and Semiotics. He co-directs the Master of European Studies in Investor Relations and Financial Communication (ESIR), a program offered by the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in collaboration with the Catholic University of Milan.

After graduating in literature, he studied at the University of Geneva (DES in Discourse Analysis) and at the Catholic University of Milan, where he obtained a Ph.D. in linguistic sciences.

He has published extensively in the fields of argumentation, pragmatics, semantics, and discourse analysis. He published a monograph on the relationship between the semantics of modal expressions and argumentation (Modality in Argumentation, Springer 2017) and is co-author (with Marcel Danesi) of a textbook on the contribution of linguistics to intercultural understanding (Global Linguistics, De Gruyter 2009). He co-edited, with Louis de Saussure, an encyclopedic volume on verbal communication (Verbal Communication, De Gruyter 2016). He has directed/is directing several projects on argumentation in the contexts of journalism, corporate communication, and financial communication funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Andrea Rocci's research interests focus on argumentation, a topic that lies at the intersection of linguistic sciences, the study of ordinary reasoning processes, and the analysis of persuasive discourse in various communicative contexts.

His theoretical research has centered on the relationship between argumentation and the semantic and pragmatic aspects of language, highlighting the role of modal and evidential structures and, more recently, the dynamics of concession and counter-argumentation in discourse and dialogue. In parallel, he has been interested in multimodal argumentation, focusing on the interaction between text and images in advertising discourse and educational texts.

His attention to argumentation within different arenas of communication has led him to engage with newsroom interactions and the construction of journalistic texts, the argumentative nature of fact-checking, as well as to develop a specific interest in the role of argumentation in interactions that occur within financial markets.

His ongoing research focuses on large-scale analysis of argumentation within complex debates in society and markets (climate change and energy transition, artificial intelligence), which require concepts and techniques for processing large corpora as well as the development of argumentation mining technologies.