Are They Arguing or not: A Corpus-based Study

Are They Arguing or Not? A Corpus-based Study Min-Chun Hsiao Department of English National Chengchi University No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road Taipei City 11605, Taiwan allents808@gmail.com Abstract This study reports a corpus-based analysis on the verb ARGUE in written texts. By adopting Frame Semantics, we analyzed 1385 instances from the corpus and investigated (a) the distribution of each semantic frame; (b) the patterns occurred in each semantic frame; and (c) the topics argued over by arguers. The study presents the distribution of frames in written texts and demonstrates the findings in terms of the common or unique patterns in each frame. In addition, some common topics are found among arguers. Introduction ARGUE 1 is a verb containing controversial perspectives. It means to express incompatible opinions emotionally; at the same time, it also means to discuss in a rational way. These two meanings are captured in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), where ARGUE can be either ‘to speak angrily to somebody’ as in (1.1), or ‘to give reasons to persuade people you are right’ (see 1.2). (1.1) We are always arguing with each other about money. (OALD) (1.2) She argued the case for bringing back the death penalty. (OALD) The subject we quarrels with each other angrily in (1.1), while she argues with reasons to persuade others in (1.2). In addition to these word senses, in academic writing, Hyland (2002:8) suggested that ARGUE “signal[s] a supportive role for the reported information in the writer’s argument, often by 1 In this study, ARGUE is in capitals as a lemma including the word forms of argue, argues, argued, and arguing. Siaw-Fong Chung Associate Professor Department of English National Chengchi University No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road Taipei City 11605, Taiwan sfchung@nccu.edu.tw attributing a high degree of confidence to the proposition” as in (1.3). (1.3) Keynesians argue that V tends to vary inversely with M, but also rather unpredictably. (J152036)2 In (1.3), ARGUE serves as the verb to report the proposition from the arguer, which could be the writer or the subject of ARGUE (i.e., Keynesians) in academic writing. From the above, three word senses of ARGUE (including the writer’s unique use of ARGUE) have been demonstrated. In this paper, we are interested to investigate the componential details of ARGUE that give rise to its different uses in written texts. Literature Review Levin (1993) discussed the syntactic behaviors of ARGUE by categorizing it with other semantically related verbs into a verb class based on the assumption that “various aspects of the syntactic behaviors of the verbs are tied to their meanings” (p.5). ARGUE is semantically related to verbs that refer to “group activities which inherently involve more than one participant” (p.200), and hence is categorized into ‘Verbs of Social Interaction’. Some syntactic behaviors were listed, including (a) when the subject refers to a single person, the sentence usually contain a with-phrase to indicate other participants (see 2.1a), and (b) when the subject is a collective noun phrase, it sometimes does not need …

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