Abstract

For quite some time now the French linguist Oswald Ducrot has been trying to develop a new theory of argumentation in the language-system, a theory that explores the argumentative potential of language as a system. In this paper I will try to sh ow how--from the standpoint of TAL--the role of cotext in linguistic analysis is often overestimated. The basic features of the cotext are already given by the utterance itself: cotext does not interpret a given utterance, but the utterance in many respects, creates the cotext.