Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as ‘therefore’. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of ‘therefore’, as well as for uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. We argue that a comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and different flavors of argument connectives.

论证在逻辑和哲学中一直发挥着核心作用。但是，作为一种独特的话语，具有自己的语义和语用学的论证很少受到关注。本文的目标是研究我们在话语中进行论证的机制，从论证连接词的语义开始，例如“因此”。虽然文献中提出了一些建议，但它们未能解释“therefore”的独特照应行为，以及在复杂论证、假设论证、具有非陈述性结论的论证以及论证中论证连接词的使用带括号。我们认为，对论点的全面描述需要在上下文中强加一种独特的树状结构。