POSSIBILITY OF DETERMINING ARGUMENTATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE ARTICLES: THE CASE OF LATVIAN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12955/pss.v2.225Keywords:
scientific language, argumentation, text zoning, article, social scienceAbstract
Argumentation is an essential part of the research process and its linguistic representation. Argumentation, as well as the formation of appropriate wording requires that the author is familiar with different types of argumentation and the experience with their use to substantiate one's thoughts and statements in a proper scientific way. Until now, argumentation as an object of linguistic research in scientific has been widely researched, but in the context of scientific articles in Latvian, it has not been studied at all.
This paper explores the possibilities of qualitative analysis of argumentation in order to develop a methodology for determining the presence of argumentation and further linguistic research on it (for example, classification of argumentation by strategy, structure, scope or expansion, etc.).
To achieve the intended goal, 20 social science articles (published from 2016–2018) in Latvian have been selected from the fields of political science, economics and business, education, and sociology. These articles were structurally different, 8 articles strictly adhered to IMRaD format, 6 articles partially followed it (mainly the discussion section was missing) while the remaining 6 articles completely ignored the IMRaD format. The selection of articles was done to accept or reject the initial hypothesis that the proportion of argumentation is directly related to the IMRaD structure of the articles.
To determine the argumentation, the same research methods that are used in computational linguistics are applied to qualitative research and manual text zone marking is used. The study was intended to obtain and test a universal methodological approach that could be used for future linguistic research in disciplines (mainly humanities and arts) where the IMRaD structure is not used.
References
Apsalons, Edmunds (2011). Valodas lietojuma loģika. Ievads elementārajā loģikā un zinātniskajā argumentācijā. Kultūras zinātne un filozofija. [Logic of language use. Introduction to elementary logic and scientific argumentation. Culturology and philosophy.] Rīga: Zvaigzne ABC.
Dubova, Agnese; Egle, Baiba; Proveja, Egita (2020). IMRAD usage in Latvian language research papers. Proceedings of CBU in Social Sciences 1, 33–39. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12955/pss.v1.42
Egle, Baiba, Tomase, Kristīne (2020). Zinātniskā raksta specifika sociālajās zinātnēs. [Specifics of the scientific article in the social sciences]. Vārds un tā pētīšanas aspekti: rakstu krājums, 24 (1/2). Liepāja: LiePA, 280–288. DOI: https://dom.lndb.lv/data/obj/879147.html
Ehlich, Konrad. (2014). Argumentieren als sprachliche Ressource des diskursiven Lernens. [Argumentation as a language resource of discursive learning]. Antonie Hornung, Gabriella Carobbio, Daniela Sorrentino (eds.). Diskursive und textuelle Strukturen in der Hochschuldidaktik. Deutsch und Italienisch im Vergleich. (Sprach-Vermittlungen, Vol. 12). Münster, New York: Waxmann, 41–54.
Graefen, Gabriele, Thielmann, Winfried. (2007). Der wissenschaftliche Artikel. [The scientific article]. Peter Auer, Harald Baßler. Reden und Schreiben in der Wissenschaft. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 31–97.
Kirschner, Christian, Eckle-Kohler, Judith; Gurevych, Iryna. (2015). Linking the Thoughts. Analysis of Argumentation Structures in Scientific Publications. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Argumentation Mining, 1–11, Denver, Colorado, June 4. Association for Computational Linguistics.
PLOS. (n.d.). How to Write Discussions and Conclusions. Retrieved 31/04/2021, from https://plos.org/resource/how-to-write-conclusions
RSU1 - Rīgas Stradiņa universitāte. (2015). Zinātniskie raksti: 2014. gada sociālo zinātņu nozares pētnieciskā darba publikācijas. Ekonomika. Komunikācija. Politika. Socioloģija. Sociālā politika un sociālais darbs. Tiesības.[Scientific articles; Social science research publications 2014. Economics. Communication. Politics. Sociology, Social Politics and Social Work.] Rīga: RSU.
RSU2 - Rīgas Stradiņa universitāte. (2016). Zinātniskie raksti: 2015. gada sociālo zinātņu nozares pētnieciskā darba publikācijas. Pedagoģija. Tiesības. [Scientific articles; Social science research publications 2015. Pedagogy. Law]. Rīga: RSU.
RSU3 - Rīgas Stradiņa universitāte. (2017). Zinātniskie raksti: 2016. gada sociālo zinātņu nozares pētnieciskā darba publikācijas. Politika. [Scientific articles; Social science research publications 2016. Politics.]. Rīga: RSU.
RSU4 - Rīgas Stradiņa universitāte. (2018). Zinātniskie raksti: 2017. gada sociālo zinātņu nozares pētnieciskā darba publikācijas. Politika. Tiesības. [Scientific articles; Social science research publications 2017. Politics. Law.]. Rīga: RSU.
Roncoroni, Tiziana. (2015). Argumentative Strategien in deutschen und italienischen wissenschaftlichen Artikeln. Am Beispiel der Soziologie und der Sprachwissenschaft. [Argumentative strategies in German and Italian scientific articles. Based on Sociology and Linguistics]. (Variolingua. Nonstandard – Standard – Substandard, Vol. 47). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Swales, John M. (1990). Genre Analysis. English in academic and research settings. (The Cambridge applied linguistics series). Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press.
Teufel, Simone. (1999). Argumentative Zoning: Information Extraction from Scientific Text. PhD, University of Edinburgh.
Teufel, Simone, Carletta, Jean, Moens, Marc. (1999). An annotation scheme for discourse-level argumentation in research articles. Proceedings of the Ninth EACL, 110–117.
Teufel, Simone, Siddharthan, Advaith, Batchelor, Colin. (2009). Towards Discipline-Independent Argumentative Zoning: Evidence from Chemistry and Computational Linguistics. Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1493–1502, Singapore, 6–7 August. 2009 ACL and AFNLP.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Author
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The author is the copyright holder. Distribution license: CC Attribution 4.0.
