The intertextuality of argumentation: a semiotic approach to academic writing in higher education

Abstract The importance of argumentation in academic writing, while historically recognised, has arguably lost prominence alongside the rapid expansion of higher education since the early 1990s in the UK. This has been exacerbated by an increasingly prevalent technological intervention in teaching and learning processes. With this as a background, this article presents a semiotic analysis of student dissertation extracts to illustrate the role of intertextuality in governing interpretative, evaluative, and concluding propositions in argumentation. Each proposition is perceived as indexed to syntactical compositionality by which a previous proposition elicits a present one that awaits a future one, thus forming a line of argument. The analysis teases out what is at stake concerning the interdependence of signifying codes in textual relations and functions. This brings into view a network of sign actions that lends itself to instances of signification in mediating and coordinating propositions in argumentation. The article concludes with reflection on the medium of English as a lingua franca for studies in higher education, highlighting a semiotic understanding of the intertextuality of argumentation in academic writing.