The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives

Jennifer Schumann University of Bern ; Sandrine Zufferey University of Bern ; Steve Oswald University of Fribourg

Abstract

AbstractWhile the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation.

Journal
Argumentation
Published
2021-09-01
DOI
10.1007/s10503-020-09540-0
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Hybrid
Topics
Export

Citation Context

References (74) · 4 in this index

  1. Argumentation
  2. Aikin, Scott F., and John P. Casey. 2016. Straw men, iron men and argumentative virtue. Topoi 35: 431–440. ht…
    Topoi  
  3. Anscombre, Jean-Claude. 2001. Le rôle du lexique dans la théorie des stéréotypes. Langages 142: 57–76.
    Langages  
  4. Anscombre, Jean-Claude, and Oswald Ducrot. 1977. Deux mais en français. Lingua 43(1): 23–40. https://doi.org/…
    Lingua  
  5. L’argumentation dans la langue
Show all 74 →
  1. Opérateurs discursifs du français
  2. Bizer, George Y., Shirel M. Kozak, and Leigh Ann Holterman. 2009. The persuasiveness of the straw man rhetori…
    Social Influence  
  3. Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Relevance and linguistic meaning. The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. …
  4. Carel, Marion. 1999. Le problème du paradoxe dans une sémantique argumentative. Langue Française 123: 6–26.
    Langue Française  
  5. Caron, J., H.C. Micko, and M. Thüring. 1988. Conjunctions and the recall of composite sentences. Journal of M…
    Journal of Memory and Language  
  6. Cozijn, Reiner, Leo G.M. Noordman, and Wietske Vonk. 2011. Propositional integration and world-knowledge infe…
    Discourse Processes  
  7. Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency. Forms and functions across languages and registers
  8. Argumentation and language—Linguistic, cognitive and discursive explorations
  9. de Saussure, Louis, and Steve Oswald. 2008. L’engagement comme notion cognitive associée au destinataire. L’A…
    L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria
  10. Language, Culture, and Mind
  11. Degand, Liesbeth, and Henk Pander Maat. 2003. A contrastive study of Dutch and French causal connectives on t…
    LOT Occasional Series
  12. Lieux communs, topoi, stéréoptypes, chlichés
  13. Les mots du discours
  14. Franken, Nathalie. 1996. Pour une nouvelle description de puisque. Revue Romane 31(1): 3–17.
    Revue Romane
  15. Hahn, Ulrike, and Jos Hornikx. 2016. A normative framework for argument quality: Argumentation schemes with a…
    Synthese  
  16. Cohesion in English
  17. Fallacies
  18. Fallacies: Classical and contemporary readings
  19. Harris, Adam J.L., Ulrike Hahn, Jens K. Madsen, and Anne S. Hsu. 2016. The appeal to expert opinion: Quantita…
    Cognitive Science  
  20. Les mots de l’argumentation
  21. Hinton, Martin. 2019. Language and argument: A review of the field. Research in Language 17(1): 93–103. https…
    Research in Language  
  22. Kamalski, Judith, Leo Lentz, Ted Sanders, and Rolf A. Zwaan. 2008. The forewarning effect of coherence marker…
    Discourse Processes  
  23. Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít…
    Lexicography  
  24. Knott, Alistair, and Robert Dale. 1994. Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations. …
    Discourse Processes  
  25. Argumentation
  26. Lewiński, Marcin, and Steve Oswald. 2013. When and how do we deal with straw men? A normative and cognitive p…
    Journal of Pragmatics  
  27. Lillo-Unglaube, Marco, Andrés Canales-Johnson, Gorka Navarrete, and Claudio Fuentes Bravo. 2014. Toward an ex…
    Frontiers in Psychology  
  28. Mann, William C., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of te…
    Text
  29. Mercier, Hugo. 2020. Not born yesterday. The science of who we trust and what we believe. Princeton, NJ, USA:…
  30. Millis, Keith K., Jonathan M. Golding, and Gregory Barker. 1995. Causal connectives increase inference genera…
    Discourse Processes  
  31. Argumentation
  32. Müller, Misha-Laura. 2020. Non-propositional meanings and commitment attribution. In Argumentation and Meanin…
  33. Murray, John D. 1997. Connectives and narrative text: The role of continuity. Memory & Cognition 25: 227–236.…
    Memory & Cognition  
  34. Oswald, Steve, Sara Greco, Johanna Miecznikowski, Chiara Pollaroli and Andrea Rocci (eds.). 2020. Argumentati…
  35. Oswald, Steve, Thierry Herman, and Jérôme Jacquin. (eds). 2018. Argumentation and Language. Linguistic, Cogni…
  36. Rhétorique et cognition: Perspectives théoriques et stratégies persuasives
  37. Ozols, Davis, Didier Maillat and Steve Oswald. 2016. Repetition as a context selection constraint: a study in…
  38. Pit, Mirna. 2003. How to express yourself with a causal connective. Subjectivity and causal connectives in Du…
  39. Pit, Mirna. 2007. Cross-linguistic analyses of backward causal connectives in Dutch, German and French. Langu…
    Languages in Contrast  
  40. Pollaroli, Chiara, Sarah Greco, Steve Oswald, Johanna Miecznikowski, and Andrea Rocci (eds.). 2019. Rhetoric …
  41. Rocci, Andrea, Sara Greco, Rebecca Schär, Josephine Convertini, Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, and Antonio Ianna…
  42. Roulet, Eddy. 1984. Speech acts, discourse structure, and pragmatic connectives. Journal of Pragmatics 8: 31–…
    Journal of Pragmatics  
  43. Roze, Charlotte, Laurence Danlos, and Philippe Muller. 2012. LEXCONN: A French lexicon of discourse connectiv…
  44. Sanders, Ted J. M. 2005. Coherence, causality and cognitive complexity in discourse. Presented at the Proceed…
  45. Sanders, Ted J.M., Jentine Land, and Gerben Mulder. 2007. Linguistic markers of coherence improve text compre…
    Information Design Journal  
  46. Sanders, Ted J.M., and Leo Noordman. 2000. The role of coherence relations and their linguistic markers in te…
    Discourse Processes  
  47. Schumann, Jennifer, Sandrine Zufferey, and Steve Oswald. 2019. What makes a straw man acceptable? Three exper…
    Journal of Pragmatics  
  48. Simon, Anne-Catherine, and Lisbeth Degand. 2007. Connecteurs de causalité, implication du locuteur et profils…
    Journal of French Language Studies  
  49. Relevance: Communication and cognition
  50. Stukker, Ninke, and Ted J.M. Sanders. 2012. Subjectivity and prototype structure in causal connectives: A cro…
    Journal of Pragmatics  
  51. Fallacies and argument appraisal
  52. Traxler, Matthew J., Michael D. Bybee, and Martin J. Pickering. 1997. Influence of connective on language com…
    The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A  
  53. Argumentation
  54. Uzelgun, Mehmet Ali, Dima Mohammed, Marcin Lewiński, and Paula Castro. 2015. Managing disagreement through ye…
    Discourse Studies  
  55. van Eemeren, Frans H., Bart Garssen, and Bert Meuffels. 2009. Fallacies and judgments of reasonableness. Empi…
  56. van Eemeren, Frans H., Bart Garssen, and Bert Meuffels. 2012. The disguised abusive ad hominem empirically in…
    Thinking & Reasoning  
  57. van Eemeren, Frans H., Bart Garssen, Erik C. W. Krabbe, A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bart Verheij, and Jean…
  58. Argumentation, communication, and fallacies: A pragma-dialectical perspective
  59. van Eemeren, Frans H., Rob Grootendorst, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2002. Argumentation. Analysis, ev…
  60. van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter Houtlosser. 1999. Strategic manoeuvring in argumentative discourse. Discours…
    Discourse Studies  
  61. van Eemeren, Frans H., Peter Houtlosser, and A. Francisca Snoek Henkemans. 2007a. Dialectical profiles and in…
  62. van Eemeren, Frans H., Peter Houtlosser, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2007b. Argumentative indicators i…
  63. A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy
  64. Walton, Douglas. 1996. The straw man fallacy. In Logic and Argumentation, eds. Johan van Benthem, Frans H. va…
  65. Walton, Douglas, Chris Reed, and Fabriozio Macagno. 2013 [2008]. Argumentation Schemes. New York, USA: Cambri…
  66. Zufferey, Sandrine. 2012. “Car, parce que, puisque” revisited: Three empirical studies on French causal conne…
    Journal of Pragmatics  
  67. Zufferey, Sandrine. 2014. Givenness, procedural meaning and connectives: The case of French puisque. Journal …
    Journal of Pragmatics  
  68. Zufferey, Sandrine, and Bruno Cartoni. 2012. English and French causal connectives in contrast. Languages in …
    Languages in Contrast  
  69. Zufferey, Sandrine, and Pascal M. Gygax. 2016. The role of perspective shifts for processing and translating …
    Discourse Processes