Deniability in ARgumentation and LINGuistics 

Summary

Type of project: SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation). Project number 10006525.

Abstract: Deniability is often seen as a threat to deliberative democracy, as it interferes with the accountability of political actors; in denying their statements or their actions, they may indeed avoid blame, escape responsibility and remain reputationally unharmed. DARLING adopts an argumentative conception of deniability and investigates (i) its linguistic and pragmatic expression, (ii) its rhetorical effects, as mediated by what is denied and how it is denied, and (iii) the normative perception of denials as parts of argumentative sequences of moves together with their distribution in existing datasets.

The project is interdisciplinary, as it combines corpus linguistic methods for the annotation of large datasets with experimental methods meant to document rhetorical effects and normative judgements on denials at the pragmatic, rhetorical and dialectical level. It incorporates two strands of research, each with its specific objectives. Strand 1 (corpus analysis) aims (i) to develop a complete account of deniability in natural discourse that considers its linguistic, rhetorical-argumentative and dialectical features, and (ii) to produce a full-fledged annotated dataset comprising two distinct sources (political and legal discourse) for linguistic and argumentative properties of denials in natural discourse. Strand 2 (experimental studies) will (iii) develop an empirically justified inventory of rhetorical effects of different deniability types and pragmatic formulations, while (iv) supplying an account of normative perceptions of different dialectical profiles of deniability in argumentative discourse.

Overall, DARLING seeks to (v) develop a data-driven and language user-driven account of deniability to better understand its strategic (evasive/deceptive) use in political and legal public discourse.