Het effect van de positie van bijwoordelijke bepalingen
Forum - 25 mei 2007
In de faculteit wordt veel onderzoek verricht. In de rubriek Het onderzoek van… vertelt telkens een promovendus of andere researcher over de grandeur en misère van het onderzoek doen. Vijf vragen aan Assimakis Tseronis (LUCL): Wat voor pragmatisch effect heeft de positie van bijwoordelijke bepalingen die een standpunt uitdrukken in een juridisch betoog?
Introduce yourself. Why did you start working on this particular research project?
During my B.A. studies in Greek Philology and General Linguistics at the University of Athens, I became familiar with studying language as a system in a diachronic or synchronic perspective, focusing on linguistic competence or performance, and looking at the various levels of linguistic analysis or at the relation between language and the world. Being more interested in the synchronic study of linguistic performance and the relation between language and society, I pursued my M.A. studies at the University of Lancaster. There I was exposed to the study of language beyond the sentence level from a functional and communicative perspective and to the study of the interplay between the use of language and the representation and the shaping of ideas in society. The conception of language as action and the functional approach to language and communication have been at the centre of my interests ever since, but I have been looking for a way to apply them in a specific form of communication and from a perspective that would not define meaning primarily in terms of the social effects that the use of language has. At the University of Amsterdam I came into contact with Argumentation Theory and the various perspectives from where reasoning from premises to a conclusion can be studied. Right from the start my concern was how language comes into play in the process of arguing and what is the effect of the choices the arguers can make from what is afforded by the language system. The Ph.D. project that I started at Leiden University in 2004 is on the effect that qualification of standpoints by means of stance adverbials has on the burden of proof that is incurred on the protagonist of the standpoint in argumentative discourse.
Describe the research topic. What is the general question you are trying to answer?
Stance adverbials are words like ‘clearly, obviously, perhaps, technically, frankly, actually, fortunately, ironically’. They can be used in order to qualify the utterance in which they appear by adding a comment concerning the attitude of the speaker towards the proposition that is asserted in the utterance or the act that is performed by means of that utterance:
- Obviously some situations are much more serious and therefore more difficult to resolve than a dispute over an untidy room.
- Fortunately, it’s simpler than it looks.
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Frankly I think you would look pretty silly weighing out your lettuce when an ounce provides only three calories.
Said Mr Idun: “Quite frankly, council officers should not have anything to do with the investigation because they are council officers who are involved with the department. Any investigation needs to be fair and seen to be fair and the only way that can happen is to take it out of the hands of the council”.
In the analysis of argumentative discourse from a dialectical perspective, the interest lies in externalizing the commitments that the parties involved in it undertake, in order to assess the extent to which their contribution to the discussion has helped reach a resolution to the dispute in a critical rational manner. An analysis of the argumentation in the above fragment would seek to establish whether the argument adduced in support of the standpoint is a strong one, that is not only whether the argument is sufficient in removing the doubt that another party may have but also whether it is in line with the norms that govern the conduct of a critical discussion.
To be able to answer these questions one needs, among other things, to consider the way the standpoint was presented in that discourse and to account for it in terms of the pragmatics of argumentation rather than in purely semantic, cognitive, or social terms. In this direction, I seek to describe the argumentative relevance of the choices that a protagonist of a standpoint can make when qualifying it, in order to provide a tool for the analysis of argumentative discourse where standpoints qualified by stance adverbials are advanced. I postulate the concept of the management of the burden of proof as the argumentative explanation for the choice of an arguer to qualify the standpoint: the protagonist has chosen a particular way to qualify the standpoint in a given discussion in his attempt to reach an end of the discussion where he has successfully met his obligation to defend it.
What are the most fascinating aspects of this project?
This project makes the most out of my academic background in a way that helps me build on the common ground between various approaches and to explain their differences in the light of the different starting points that they assume while their object of study remains the same. Adverbials and stance adverbials have received the interest of scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives within linguistics and have been studied with respect to all levels of linguistic analysis, so my readings especially in the first year covered a range of approaches from syntax, semantics and typology to pragmatics, conversation and discourse analysis. Similarly, the concepts of the burden of proof and commitments have taken some of my early readings into such fields as juridical argumentation, philosophy of science and philosophy of language.
The other fascinating aspect of this project is the need to combine theoretical assumptions about how argumentative discussions should ideally proceed, if they were to reach a resolution of a dispute in a critical rational manner, with adequate descriptions of argumentative discourse. Given the questions of my project, I am studying language use in context and thereby I look at cases of argumentation drawn from written or spoken discourse as found in language corpora or on the Internet. At the same time, I need to provide a theoretical account of how qualification works with respect to the concept of the burden of proof prioritizing empirical observations over theoretical speculations and vice versa.
What do you hope to achieve?
The claim that I make in my Ph.D. is not an empirical one. I do not suggest that when one uses one or the other adverbial to qualify the utterance by which he expresses his point of view he stands more or less chances of convincing the audience about the correctness of his opinion. With the theoretical account that I try to develop, I seek to contribute to the analysis of argumentative discourse a tool for better justifying the reconstruction that is proposed each time. Such a tool would ideally list the critical questions that an analyst needs to ask in order to assess the argumentative relevance of a stance adverbial appearing as a qualifier of the standpoint in a given piece of discourse.
How do you like being a PhD student in this faculty?
Leiden was already known to me from my B.A. years as the centre for classical studies, manuscript collections and editions. When I arrived in the Netherlands, I found out that Leiden was known for its strong research in theoretical linguistics. And only after becoming an AiO at LUCL did I discover that Leiden was all the time famous for its research in descriptive linguistics too. The LUCL institute under which my research falls is an ambitious and positive attempt to bring together research on language and about language that cuts across the various theoretical viewpoints, something which I find quite promising. I feel inspired and motivated to be a member of such a diverse and research oriented institute.