The Logic of the Arguer: Representing Natural Argumentative Discourse in Adpositional Argumentation

In this paper, we show how to represent natural argumentative discourse through Adpositional Argumentation, a uniform framework for expressing linguistic and pragmatic aspects of such discourse on various levels of abstraction. Starting from representing the utterer and the utterance, we expand to claims and minimal arguments, finally focusing on complex argumentation in three different structures: convergent (many premises), divergent (many conclusions), and serial (an argument whose premise is the conclusion of another argument). An innovative feature of the framework is that it enables the analyst to provide a granular description of natural argumentative discourse, thus letting the logic of the arguer dynamically unfold while the discourse is presented without enforcing any particular interpretation.