Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

Conspiracy And Bias: Argumentative Features And Persuasiveness Of Conspiracy Theories, Steve Oswald

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper deals with the argumentative biases Conspiracy Theories (henceforth CTs) typically suffer from and pursues two goals: (i) the identification of recurring argumentative and rhetorical features of conspiracy theories, which translates into an attempt to elaborate their argumentative profile (see Hansen 2013); (ii) the elaboration of a cognitively-grounded account of CTs in terms of their persuasiveness.

To fulfil goal (i), I examine online instances of different cases of CTs (the Moon hoax, 9/11 as an inside job, chemical trails). Building on the general rhetorical features of CTs identified by Byford (2011: 88-93), I elaborate a first argumentative profile surveying …

Strategies Of Objectification In Opinion Articles: The Case Of Evidentials, Elena Musi

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper investigates lexical evidentials in an English corpus (30 texts) about oil drilling issues in the Adriatic Sea. Lexical evidentials (e.g. see, must, find, evidently) indicate “the kind of justification for a factual claim which is available to the person making that claim […]” (Anderson 1986: 274). They constitute a privileged viewpoint to investigate how and at which degree journalists manage to present their claims as objective since they work as argumentative indicators (Van Eemeren et al. 2007), pointing to inherently subjective (e.g. I find that x) or possibly objective (e.g. It must be …