Connectives and Straw Men. Experimental approach on French and English

In this paper, we present experiments designed to assess the role of causal connectives with an attributive meaning (e.g. since and puisque) on the acceptability of straw man fallacies. Our results show that connectives play a role for the detection of straw man fallacies by increasing readers’ awareness to the speaker’s persuasive intent, thus creating a forewarning effect. We also uncover a crucial difference between causal connectives both within and across languages. Taken together, our experiments plead in favor of conducting fine-grained analyses of connectives in different languages in order to deepen our understanding of their role for argumentation