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To present the instructional activities of an intervention enacted in two formative experiment studies. The goal of these studies was to improve students’ argumentative writing, both conventional and digital, multimodal.

This chapter provides the instructional steps taken by high-school teachers as they integrated multimodal argument projects into their classroom, describing the planning and instructional activities needed to teach students both the elements of argument and the practice of digital, multimodal design.

The author discusses the practical pedagogical steps and considerations needed to have students create digital, multimodal arguments in the form of infographics and public service announcements. Students were engaged in the creation of these arguments; however, practical considerations are discussed for both task complexity and the merger between digital and conventional writing.

Research suggests that integrating digital tools and multimodality into classrooms may be needed and valued, but practical suggestions for this integration are lacking. This chapter provides the needed pedagogical application of digital tools and multimodality to academic instruction.

Institutions are built upon language. Although we have a number of linguistic perspectives already in our arsenal, this chapter seeks to convince you of our need for just one more. The primary claim is that because the structure of arguments uniquely maps onto the latent structure of institutions, the use of arguments in institutional analysis may help us gain more traction on three important topics – the nature taken-for-grantedness, the macro-micro divide, and the political dynamics of institutions. This chapter thus offers a starting point for how to use an argumentation perspective when studying institutions.

Lack of women in boardrooms and management has been a common feature of corporate and agricultural sectors in Norway. In both sectors, quota reforms have been implemented in order to change this situation. This chapter analyses the reasons given for applying gender quotas. While public limited companies were enforced by law to elect a minimum 40 per cent women or men to their boards in 2008, the board of the Federation of Norwegian Agricultural Co-operatives (FNAC) voluntarily decided that a minimum of 40 per cent women or men should be represented in their boards by 2009. How could it be that the agricultural cooperatives introduced this voluntarily, while the business corporations were to be forced by legislation? Public documents, governmental papers, media texts and interview data are analysed to identify and compare the reasoning for gender board quotas. The comparison sheds light on our understanding of the boardroom quota as more complex than simply to deal with gender equality. Traditional gender equality arguments did play a role, but in different ways, articulations and emphasis. More pragmatic reasoning played a role. In FNAC, we saw that the process of organisation-building and modernisation played an important role in the decision to voluntarily introduce gender quotas on boards. Within the corporate sector there were no advocates for introducing gender quotas before profitability arguments came to the fore, but even though such arguments were acceptable to the corporate sector, they did not have the same effect in terms of getting volunteer support for gender quotas.

Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem calls into question the claims of both the state and individuals when they purport to act for the benefit of future children. This paper discusses how adoption of the non-identity argument as a legal argument could affect reproductive and family policy, demonstrating that it undermines the child-centric approach to assigning legal parentage. The paper concludes, however, that these non-identity problems can be solved by the expected value approach, which demonstrates that efforts to benefit future people can be logically coherent even if those efforts also affect the genetic identities of the future people.

Disasters bring about communities of focussed discourse. We show how a segment of one such community controlled the early stages of discourse during a financial crisis as a variety of professionals (bankers, analysts, editorial writers and academics) made multiple types of arguments (emotional and technical) to allay citizens’ concerns about an impending banking collapse. We examine the rapid rise of this segment by mapping and analysing the responses printed in Icelandic newspapers to a Danish bank’s warning of Icelandic banking instability. Using social network analysis, we illustrate the networks of public actors and their immediate public responses, showing how close-knit both networks became after just one week of commentary in the Icelandic press. We demonstrate the power that professionals of various kinds have over an uninformed citizenry through their rapid responses and closely connected networks and underscore the obstacles awaiting those who want to alter discourse during crisis.

The purpose of this research was to analyze the unaccusative verb in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) within the framework of MP in order to answer the research question: How does the single argument of an unaccusative verb, that carries the theme theta role and is generated in the object position, receive a nominative case without moving to the [Spec, vP], which is the base subject position?

The analysis in the paper was based on the framework of Minimalist Program (MP) which was proposed by Chomsky (2000). MP concerns economy, simplicity and efficiency in the connection between sound and meaning. Essentially, Chomsky (2000) proposes that faculty of language (FL) contains a computational system that interfaces with external systems, sensorimotor systems and systems of thought. The computational system is based on three operations. The first operation is merge, which combines two syntactic objects to form a new one. It is presented in binary branches that project a hierarchical level. The second operation is agree which establishes syntactic relation for case assignment and agreement. The final operation is move, which composes merge and agree.

The analysis demonstrated that the sole argument of an accusative verb receives the nominative case in situ. This is due to Locality of Matching in which the agreement holds between the [nom] case on T and NP in internal argument of VP. This is because there is no intervening NP between T and the sole argument in internal argument of VP, which is a base object position.

This research shows that the single argument of the unaccusative verb receives the nominative case in situ. This analysis observes the economic considerations of MP as well as respects the UTAH hypothesis, which rules out the structures where the theme asymmetrically appears as a specifier or a complement.

This study developed two presentation modes of scientific articles and evaluated their usability with user experiments.

Two presentation modes of scientific articles, simply referred to as “genre presentation mode” and “argument presentation mode”, were constructed based on their genre structure and argument structure respectively. Their usability was evaluated by being compared against the existing RichHTML presentation mode in the experiments using eye-tracking and questionnaire methods.

The participants who were going to find the specific information of scientific articles rated the genre presentation mode higher than they did with either the argument or the RichHTML presentation mode for effectiveness. In contrast, those who were going to understand the general idea of scientific articles rated both the genre and argument presentation mode higher than they did with the RichHTML mode. In terms of efficiency, the participants took less reading time when the articles of non-native language were presented with the genre mode than they did when the articles were presented with the argument mode. When reading the articles in native language to understand the general idea, the participants took less reading time for the articles presented with the argument mode than they did for the articles presented with the genre mode. In comparison, they took less reading time when the articles were presented with the argument mode if they were going to find specific information. For satisfaction, the genre presentation mode was more popular than the argument mode and the RichHTML mode. However, the participants were less satisfied with the argument presentation mode than the other two when reading in native language and intending to find specific information.

The two presentation modes of scientific articles are found to improve the accuracy of information acquisition, shorten the total reading time and be more acceptable by readers.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a research model that examines the effect of argument quality and argument perspective on the adoption of online reviews in a value-based decision model. In addition, the paper investigates the moderating effects of argument quality from needs theory.

To validate the research model, a questionnaire survey was conducted in the Chinese online shopping context. Hypotheses were tested using partial least squares analysis on a data set of 208 online consumers.

The results suggest that argument quality and argument perspective have positive impacts on perceived value, further influencing the adoption of online reviews. Moreover, the results confirm that the information credibility and quantity sufficiency of online reviews are positively associated with argument quality. The findings also indicate that argument quality mediates the relationship between argument perspective and perceived value.

This work contributes to the literature by employing a value-based decision model to study the adoption of online reviews in the online shopping context, as well as the moderating effect of argument quality on the argument perspective to perceived value. The main conclusions of this study can be valuable to online marketing managers.

This study aims to distinguish between service arguments and communication arguments within a home-sharing review and to investigate their roles in consumer purchase decision-making.

Based on the setting of Airbnb, a 3 (service argument valence: positive, neutral, and negative) × 3 (communication argument valence: positive, neutral, and negative) online experiment was conducted. Data collected from 379 participants were used to test the hypotheses.

The three main determinants of purchase intention: perceived host service quality, perceived facility service quality, and perceived social value, are affected by both service arguments and communication arguments. Service arguments positively influence perceived host service quality and perceived facility service quality, while communication arguments contribute significantly to perceived host service quality and perceived social value. However, perceived facility service quality is affected by the combination of service arguments and communication arguments rather than by the service arguments only, because service argument trustworthiness, a factor influencing the effect of service arguments, varies across the combination of two types of arguments.

This research helps home-sharing platform managers to understand how to facilitate transaction success through displaying different review arguments needed by consumers. Additionally, the dual role of communication arguments emphasizes a necessity for hosts to encourage positive communication arguments and provide additional cues on the facility service quality.

The service arguments and communication arguments in home-sharing reviews are distinguished, and their distinct roles in consumers' purchase intention have been uncovered.

This paper aims to examine a two-way interaction between social influencers’ number of followers (micro vs meso) and argument quality (weak vs strong) on consumers’ self-reported and brain responses to advertising posts on Instagram. Further, drawing upon source credibility theory and contemporary theories of persuasion, the Instagram users’ perceptions of the influencer’s credibility are predicted to mediate the hypothesized effects.

Through an online (N = 192) and a lab study (N = 112), the authors examined Instagram users’ responses to an advertising post from Instagram influencers in terms of perceived source credibility and electronic word-of-mouth intention, using validated multi-item scales from existing literatures and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures. The hypotheses were tested with a 2 (type of influencer: micro vs meso) × 2 (argument quality: weak vs strong) between-subject design using mediated moderated linear regression analysis.

The results highlight that meso-influencers are perceived as a credible source of information only when their product-related post provides strong argument quality. Moreover, this process involves an increase in users’ cognitive work (measured with EEG), with possible implications on marketing communication strategies and online message design.

The limitations of the work can serve as ideas for future research. First, this study did not account for the influencer’s relevance and resonance. Second, the authors studied consumer responses to online communication produced by Instagram influencers within a single product category. Another important product type distinction that requires further attention is between hedonic and utilitarian products. Finally, the two studies only used positive review content. Further research should study how consumers evaluate the source credibility of a micro- vs meso-influencer when they are exposed to negative reviews containing weak vs strong arguments.

The results suggest that marketers should carefully consider Instagram influencers based on the trade-offs between credibility and reach. Specifically, micro-influencers are perceived as more credible sources of information than meso-influencers, which means that they have greater potential to affect Instagram users’ behavior. Moreover, the results suggest that meso-influencers should leverage argument quality to enhance their credibility and draw greater positive outcomes for the products and brands they endorse.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate how the interaction between the type of social media influencer and the argument quality affects consumers’ self-reported and brain responses to advertising posts on Instagram. Moreover, using neuroscience, this study aims to shed light on the neurophysiological processes that drive consumer responses to product-related communication posted by different influencer types.