More than Relata Refero: Representing the Various Roles of Reported Speech in Argumentative Discourse

Abstract

Reported speech, or relata refero, although not always part of the argumentation tout court, can be an important element of argumentative discourse. It might, for instance, provide information on the position of another party in the discussion or function as part of the premise of an argument from authority. Whereas existing methods of representing argumentative discourse focus on arguments and their interrelations, this paper develops a method that enables the analyst to also include informative elements in the representation, focusing on reported speech. It does so by incorporating the notion of ‘voice’ into the representation framework of Adpositional Argumentation (AdArg). In particular, the paper explains how to formalize the constituents of this notion and illustrates its use in representing (1) an author’s report of the position of another party (including the supporting argumentation); (2) an author’s own position (including the supporting argumentation); and (3) source-based arguments such as the argument from authority, with an indication of the distance of the source from the author.