What Archaeological Texts Argue About: Denotations and Ontological Proxies

Abstract

Argumentation-oriented discourse analysis usually focuses on what is being said and how, following the text under analysis quite literally, and paying little attention to the things in the world to which the text refers. However, to perform argumentation-oriented discourse analysis, one must assume certain conceptualisations by the author in order to interpret and reconstruct propositions and argumentation structures. These conceptualisations are rarely captured as a product of the analysis process. In this chapter, we argue that considering the ontology to which a discourse refers as well as the text itself provides a richer and more useful representation of the discourse and its argumentation structures, facilitates intertextual analysis, and improves understandability of the analysis products. To this end, we propose the notions of ontological proxies and denotations, i.e. the conceptual artefacts that connect elements in the argumentation structure to the associated ontology elements, and the propositional segments that anchor these to the text, respectively.