Argumentative texts and clause types

Argumentative texts have been thoroughly analyzed for their argumentative structure, and recent efforts aim at their automatic classification. This work investigates linguistic properties of argumentative texts and text passages in terms of their semantic clause types. We annotate argumentative texts with Situation Entity (SE) classes, which combine notions from lexical aspect (states, events) with genericity and habituality of clauses. We analyse the correlation of SE classes with argumentative text genres, components of argument structures, and some functions of those components. Our analysis reveals interesting relations between the distribution of SE types and the argumentative text genre, compared to other genres like fiction or report. We also see tendencies in the correlations between argument components (such as premises and conclusions) and SE types, as well as between argumentative functions (such as support and rebuttal) and SE types. The observed tendencies can be deployed for automatic recognition and fine-grained classification of argumentative text passages.