Argumentation through Discourse Relations and Subjectivity: Introducing FreCaDiS, a French Multi-Genre Corpus

Abstract

This paper addresses a crucial yet understudied issue in argumentation studies: the distinction between explanations and justifications, and their interaction with subjectivity. Building on insights from Bex and Walton (2016), who highlight the importance of not conflating explanations with arguments, we propose a corpus-based approach to operationalize this distinction in French. We present FreCaDiS (French Corpus of Causal Connectives, Discourse Relations, and Subjectivity), a novel corpus of French texts annotated for explanatory and justificatory discourse relations and their perceived subjectivity. FreCaDiS comprises excerpts of 2–3 sentences drawn from five distinct genres—SMS, online discussions, blogs, press, and contemporary literature—spanning informal to formal registers. Specifically, we focus on sentences introduced by the connectives parce que and car ("because") and annotate them along two dimensions: (i) discourse relation (explanation vs. justification) and (ii) subjectivity (subjective vs. objective). The corpus was annotated by three independent human annotators using complementary approaches: a holistic, an intuitive method for subjectivity and a guided, operationalized method for discourse relations. FreCaDiS provides a rich resource for the study of argumentation, causal discourse, causal connectives, and subjective interpretation in French and can support future work in computational argument mining, discourse analysis, and NLP applications.

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