Evidentials as argumentative indicators in the argumentative activity type of earnings conference calls

Lucchini, Costanza

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Doctoral thesis

Evidentials as argumentative indicators in the argumentative activity type of earnings conference calls

Lucchini, Costanza
Rocci, Andrea (Degree supervisor)
Miecznikowski-Fünfschilling, Johanna (Degree committee member)

2026

Phd: Università della Svizzera italiana

French This dissertation investigates the role of evidential expressions in argumentative discourse, taking as a case study their deployment in earnings conference calls (ECCs) – a key genre of institutional financial communication in which listed companies’ managers present results and financial analysts pose questions. Evidentials – linguistic markers encoding the source of knowledge – represent a valuable tool for observing the distribution of knowledge and mapping informational asymmetry in dialogue. Beyond their epistemic function, evidentials have been shown to serve as argumentative indicators. This dissertation investigates precisely this dual pragmatic and argumentative function, asking how evidentials are deployed by managers and analysts in pursuit of their respective institutional goals, how they relate to argumentative structure and argument schemes, and how their systematic use gives rise to recurrent evidential argumentative patterns reflecting the institutional logic of the genre. At the theoretical level, the study further examines the relationship among activity type, argumentative indicators, and argumentative patterns. To address these questions, the study analyses the function of evidentials in a corpus of 16 ECCs held by four publicly listed companies across the financial year 2021. The study adopts a mixed-method approach, combining quantitative corpus analysis of evidential distribution with qualitative reconstruction of arguments based on Pragma- Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The results shed light on the connections between evidentiality, argumentative function, and institutional context. First, managers and analysts display qualitatively distinct evidential profiles reflecting their asymmetric epistemic positions: managers rely predominantly on direct and subjective evidentials to construct epistemic authority and manage accountability, while analysts favour hearsay and inferential evidentials to legitimize their questions and project professional credibility. Second, evidentials function as reliable macro-level argumentative indicators, systematically associated with specific argumentative moves (premises and conclusions), with direct, hearsay, and common knowledge evidentials tending to occur in premises and inferential and subjective evidentials in conclusions. Third, at the micro-argumentative level, each evidential type instantiates recognizable argument schemes contributing in distinct ways to the justificatory force of the moves in which they appear. Fourth, the study introduces and operationalizes the concept of evidential argumentative patterns, demonstrating through the detailed analysis of hearsay-prefaced questions that these configurations function simultaneously as arguments from authority, justifications of the questioning act, and interactional strategies for managing epistemic positioning, constituting a defining feature of analysts’ discourse in ECCs. The findings contribute to research on evidentiality and argumentation in financial discourse and point to promising directions for future research, including corpus-based and computational applications.

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