As more and more sophisticated software is created to allow the mining of arguments from natural language texts, this paper sets out to examine the suitability of the well-established and readily available methods of corpus linguistics to the study of argumentation. After brief introductions to corpus linguistics and the concept of meta-argument, I describe three pilot-studies into the use of the terms Straw man, Ad hominem, and Slippery slope, made using the open access News on the Web corpus. The presence of each of these phrases on internet news sites was investigated and assessed for correspondence to the norms of use by argumentation theorists. All three pilot-studies revealed interesting facts about the usage of the terms by non-specialists, and led to numerous examples of the types of arguments mentioned. This suggests such corpora may be of use in two different ways: firstly, the wider project of improving public debate and educating the populace in the skills of critical thinking can only be helped by a better understanding of the current state of knowledge of the technical terms and concepts of argumentation. Secondly, theorists could obtain a more accurate picture of how arguments are used, by whom, and to what reception, allowing claims on such matters to be evidence, rather than intuition, based.

随着越来越多的复杂软件被创建以允许从自然语言文本中挖掘论据，本文着手研究成熟且现成的语料库语言学方法对论证研究的适用性。在简要介绍了语料库语言学和元论证的概念之后，我描述了三个关于稻草人、Ad hominem 和滑坡等术语的使用的试点研究，这些研究是使用 Web 语料库上的开放获取新闻进行的。对这些短语在互联网新闻网站上的存在进行了调查和评估，以确保其符合论证理论家的使用规范。所有三项试点研究都揭示了非专家使用这些术语的有趣事实，并导致了所提到的论点类型的众多示例。这表明此类语料库可能有两种不同的用途：首先，只有更好地理解技术术语的当前知识状态，才能帮助改善公共辩论和教育大众批判性思维技能的更广泛项目。和论证的概念。其次，理论家可以更准确地了解论证是如何使用的、由谁使用以及接受什么，从而使对此类问题的主张成为证据而非直觉。