By
Nelleke Oostdijk (scientific supervisor)
Summary
On social media, the strategic use of rhetoric where implying rather than stating extreme views outright has become increasingly prevalent. This phenomenon has recently been examined through two primary approaches: discourse analysis has focused on how implicit premises reveal ideological stances and social attitudes over logical reasoning, while linguistic studies have explored the textual and linguistic cues signaling these implicit premises. In this study, we explore how a specific discourse structure, often found in polarized discussions on immigration in Europe, creates a fertile ground for the emergence of implicit statements, serving as a framework where such statements can thrive. This structure is characterized by the arrangement of JOINT JOINT EVALUATION (JJE) coherence relations from Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which simulates a logical-argumentative flow by presenting a sequence of implicitly connected statements, culminating in a climactic statement. Furthermore it has been a focus of recent computational linguistics research, leading to the development of tools for extracting it from online comment sections. Our method involves annotating a set of automatically extracted JJEs using the IAT/ML argument modeling framework. This process enables us to reconstruct the inferential chain and pinpoint the exact locations where implicit premises fit. We begin by outlining the annotation guidelines for identifying implicit premises or implied conclusions. Since reconstructing the propositions of statements left unsaid can be highly subjective, we argue for a reconstruction based on enthymematic structure to minimize this subjectivity in the annotations. Finally, using the reconstructed propositions and the structure of the inference chain, we analyze how they align with specific textual or linguistic cues that indicate the presence of implicit premises or conclusions. To summarize, this study aims to enrich our understanding of the JJE rhetorical strategy from an argumentation perspective, by establishing a continuum between rhetoric and argumentation through a joint framework (RST and IAT/ML) based empirical analysis of comments within a corpus.
Keywords
Rhetorical structure theory (RST). Argumentation. Implicit statements. Enthymemes.