Argumentative meanings and their stylistic configurations in clinical research publications

The paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the topical organisation and stylistic features of argumentation in a corpus of ophthalmic clinical research papers. The study responds to the need for systematised and generalisable argumentation models in knowledgeintensive fields. We present here a schematised superstructure of the arguments from the corpus, charting the configurations of stylistic features, which signal the elements of this superstructure, epistemic topoi. We pay special attention to the role of lexical categories (or semantic fields) in the configurations, to the relations between the fields, and to their interactions with other elements of the configurations, including semantic, grammatical, syntagmatic, deictic, and coreferential features. Epistemic topoi are a promising discourse constituent in argumentation because, as we found, they are distinct from syntagmatic units, such as phrases, clauses, or argumentative zones, and because they are signalled with substantially distinctive stylistic features despite having no fixed order in the superstructure. They hold considerable promise for computational argumentation analysis and processing, perhaps especially in scientific and technical discourses, where the need for reliable detection and summarisation is particularly high. Our investigation shows that despite the complex and interpenetrating semantic and stylistic attributes of argumentation, there are significant, computationally tractable regularities.