Comparative analysis of rhetorical and argumentative structures in the study of popular science discourse

Abstract

The proposed work is performed as a part of an on-going research project aimed at creation of discourse annotated corpus of popular science texts written in Russian. Annotation is carried out within the framework of a multi-level model of discourse, which considers the text from the perspective of genre, rhetorical and argumentative organization. We conduct a comparative study of the rhetorical and argument annotations, discuss their similarities and differences on the segment and structural levels and show them on the examples of standard schemes of reasoning described in D. Walton's theory of structured argumentation: “Argument from Expert Opinion”, “Argument from Example”, and “Argument from Cause to Effect”. Special attention is paid to discourse markers registered during annotation as key indicators of discourse structure. We report the results of the experiment with argument indicator patterns, based on the list of rhetorical markers, and aimed at the extraction of “from Expert Opinion” arguments.