In this paper we present US2016, the largest publicly available set of corpora of annotated dialogical argumentation. The annotation covers argumentative relations, dialogue acts and pragmatic features. The corpora comprise transcriptions of television debates leading up to the 2016 US presidential elections, and reactions to the debates on Reddit. These two constitutive parts of the corpora are integrated by means of the intertextual correspondence between them. The rhetorical richness and high argument density of the communicative context results in cross-genre corpora that are robust resources for the study of the dialogical dynamics of argumentation in three ways: first, in empirical strands of research in discourse analysis and argumentation studies; second, in the burgeoning field of argument mining where automatic techniques require such data; and third, in formulating algorithmic techniques for sensemaking through the development of Argument Analytics.

Pragmatics and dialectics are two disciplines which have been amongst the first and most important partners for argument studies in the exploration of the complex realm of communication. Treating argumentation as a construct consisting of premises and conclusion allows for investigating some interesting properties of the phenomenon of reasoning, but does not capture a variety of aspects related to the usage of natural language and dialogical context in which real-life argumentation is typically embedded. This special issue explores some of the fascinating research questions which emerge when we move beyond logic into the territory of the pragmatics and dialectics of argument.

Abstract. Using the profiles of dialogue method we identify a species of ad verecundiam fallacy that works by forestalling of questioning in arguments from expert opinion. A profile of dialogue is a graph structure used to model a sequence of speech acts surrounding both the putting forward of an argument and the response to it at the next moves in a dialogue. The method is applied to a case of cross-examining a software engineer in a legal deposition in a case of intellectual property litigation.

The thesis of the paper holds that some future developments of argumentation theory may be inspired by the rich logico-methodological legacy of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS), the Polish research movement that was most active from 1895 to 1939. As a selection of ideas of the LWS which exploit both formal and pragmatic aspects of the force of argument, we present: Ajdukiewicz's account of reasoning and inference, Bocheński's analyses of superstitions or dogmas, and Frydman's constructive approach to legal interpretation. This paper does not aim at exhaustive elaboration of any of these topics or their usefulness in current discussions within argumentation theory. Rather, we intend to indicate chosen directions of a potentially fruitful research program for the emerging Polish School of Argumentation which would consist in application of methods and conceptions elaborated by the LWS to selected open problems of contemporary research on argumentation.

Ethotic arguments, such as arguments from expert opinion and ad hominem arguments, play an important role in communication practice. In this paper, we argue that there is another type of reasoning from ethos, in which people argue about actions in the world. These subspecies of ethotic arguments are very common in public debates: societies are involved in heated disputes about what should be done with monuments of historical figures such as Stalin or Colston: Should we demolish the building they funded? Should we revere their statues? Should the street named after them be renamed?; and the general public vividly argue about what should be done with the legacy of producers, directors and actors in debates of the #MeToo movement: Should their new movies be distributed? Should their scenes be deleted from motion pictures? Should their stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame be removed? Many arguments in these debates boil down to the character of the public figures: He was a slave trader!—But he is a part of our history; He harassed a young girl!—But he is an important actor. The reasoning step here is legitimised by the association between a person and an extra-linguistic object: the association between a historical figure and their statue or between an actor and their movie. The nature of this association is explained in the paper using Peirce’s theory of signs. We propose to extend an existing approach to patterns of reasoning from ethos that will help us to shed new light on ethotic argumentation and open an avenue for a systematic account of these unexplored argument forms.

The aim of this paper is to elaborate tools that would allow us to analyse arguments from authority and guard against fallacious uses of them. To accomplish this aim, we extend the list of existing argumentation schemes representing arguments from authority. For this purpose, we formulate a new argumentation scheme for argument from deontic authority along with a matching set of critical questions used to evaluate it. We argue that clarifying the ambiguity between arguments from epistemic and deontic authority helps building a better explanation of the informal fallacy of appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam).

We show how to solve common problems in identifying arguments from expert opinion, illustrated by five examples selected from The Economist. Our method started by intuitively identifying many appeals to alleged experts in The Economist and comparing them to the argumentation scheme for argument from expert opinion. This approach led us to (i) extending the existing list of possible faults committed when arguments from expert opinion are performed and (ii) proposing the extension of the list of linguistic cues that would allow analysts to identify arguments from expert opinion. Our ultimate aim is to help argument identification by argument mining connect better with techniques of argument analysis and evaluation.

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