Epistemic and Evidential Expressions as Context-Specific Argumentative Indicators in Institutional Dialogues: A Corpus Study of Interactions in the Financial Domain

Abstract

This paper presents initial results from a corpus study aimed at exploring the argumentative function of evidential expressions in financial dialogues. We assume a macro-argumentative perspective to verify the hypothesis that evidentials correlate with argumentative moves, focusing on inferential and hearsay. We find both inferential and hearsay markers to be highly correlated with argumentative discourse units with hearsay evidentials occurring in premises and inferential ones occurring along the argumentative inferential chain.